But that can be tricky in health care and certainly bumps up against the demands of Generation X and baby boomer supervisors. Combine those desires with the 80-hour residency work-hour requirements, and you start to see a culture shift, Dr. Pyne says.
“In one way, it’s simply a job for a lot of them, whereas when I trained it was our life. For us, it was and is who we are; for many of them, it’s what they do,” he says. “But at the same time, their work–life balance is admittedly probably better.”
Technology increases
connectivity It’s no secret that technology and smartphones are ubiquitous for most millennials, but this generation’s ease with tech, coupled with the speed of technological advances, could have a profound effect on health care and IR.
Fellows, residents and medical students are connected like no other generation before them, whether it’s texting or via sites like Doximity, a social networking platform for physicians and medical students. The SIR Residents, Fellows and Students Section and the Medical Student Council host their monthly meetings via an online video service. At an American Medical Association House of Delegates meeting last year, the Young Physicians Section used the GroupMe group messaging app to stay connected, prompting the radiology attendings at the meeting to start using it also, according to Laura Traube, MD, MPH, SIR Early Career Section’s young physician representative to the AMA and a millennial interventional and diagnostic radiologist at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, California.
Dr. Pyne believes the embrace of both collaboration and technology will lead millennial IRs to establish more patient registries, which will be automated into their electronic medical records (EMRs). “I bet that’s how we get much of our critical patient data in the future,” rather than through only clinical trials, he says.
“They’re going to use this crowd-sourcing knowledge in terms of better patient care,” he says. Instead of knowing a handful of IRs in their city and connecting only once a year at the SIR Annual Scientific Meeting, millennial IRs will be continually
Which generation are you? Generation
Silent Generation Baby Boomers Generation X Millennials
Year Born 1925–1945 1946–1964 1965–1980 1981–2000
Age in 2016 71–91 52–70 36–51 16–35
The Census Bureau defines only the baby boomer generation. The other generations’ span of years varies slightly depending on the source.
connected, updating and communicating with each other as a group.
Technology has also expanded training and continuing education opportunities. Erica Alexander, MD, age 26, a general surgery intern who will be going into radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, has been able to view webinars hosted by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.
“It really puts the experts and leading physicians in the field within reach,” she says. “We’re moving away from medical teaching that’s limited to textbooks or even a simple web search. My generation is really comfortable with things like that.”
Millennial physicians will also likely be more connected to patients online, sending messages back-and-forth through text, email and messaging systems. Dr. Wilson points to a HIPAA-compliant message system at the University of Maryland’s Family Medicine Clinic that allows patients to choose to receive messages via text. This is particularly important for patients who move around a lot or who are living in poverty and often don’t have home Internet access or a computer, he says. “But everybody has a smartphone these days.”
Dr. Wilson is also looking forward to the day when the health care field figures out how to integrate electronic medical records into one system nationwide and incorporate these messaging platforms into it. “That’s a big challenge facing physicians in the future—how to integrate those [EMR] systems so they work the way we always said they would when we implemented them.”
Eric Keller, MA, a medical student and clinical research fellow at Northwestern
University, agrees: “The people in my generation do value immediate gratification. We do value being connected a lot more,” he says. “And we’re frustrated with the inefficiencies of EMRs.”
Keller points to EMRs that might list up to 30 prescriptions for a patient, even though that individual may no longer be taking many of those drugs. He looks forward to the creation of more efficient systems and smartphone apps to allow patients to keep track of current medications and update their EMRS and doctors.
The future of IR As IR develops its own residency program, millennials will be at the forefront, using their technology skills, collaborative nature and desire for work-life balance to shape the specialty.
“I think the millennials’ involvement in IR as a whole is because SIR has really embraced us,” Dr. Alexander says. “It’s nice to be a part of a field that prides itself on growing and advancing and improving technology and patient care.”
Melanie Padgett Powers is a writer/editor in the Washington, D.C., area. She specializes in health writing and has also written for the American
Optometric Association, Cleveland Clinic, American College of Ob-Gyns, American Public Health Association and National Hemophilia Foundation.
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SPRING 2016 | IR QUARTERLY 29
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