The Worthy Physician

Beyond Vital Signs: Healing Through Human Connection with Dr. Stephen DeMeo

• Dr. Sapna Shah-Haque MD

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What happens when physicians feel more like data entry specialists than healers? In this deeply reflective conversation, neonatologist Dr. Stephen DeMeo reveals how rediscovering meaningful human connections can transform both patient care and physician well-being.

The NICU offers a unique healthcare environment where cutting-edge critical care intersects with deeply personal family journeys. Dr. DeMeo explains how sitting with families during their most vulnerable moments—whether celebrating tiny victories or navigating heartbreaking decisions—often clarifies clinical situations more effectively than any technological intervention. "Sometimes the most difficult conversations I have with parents are ones where I actually know that the baby's going to be just fine," he shares, highlighting how each family experiences medical events through their unique emotional lens.

Beyond patient care, Dr. DeMeo addresses systemic challenges facing today's physicians: the documentation burden that steals time from meaningful interactions, the tendency toward depersonalization when burned out, and the delicate balance between medicine as calling versus occupation. His refreshingly practical solution to burnout? Going deeper into patient connections rather than withdrawing. "If I committed more to the reconnection of medicine...put the computer on wheels to the side, sit down in your patient's room, talk to them...all of that connection has been really restorative for me."

Looking toward medicine's future, Dr. DeMeo expresses optimism about technology's potential to free physicians from administrative burdens while advocating for more humane training environments for medical students. His perspective offers a hopeful vision where AI and other innovations might actually help doctors return to medicine's fundamental purpose: humans caring for humans during life's most challenging moments.

Topics covered:

• Technology should enhance human connection, not replace it
• Reconnecting with patients is the antidote to physician burnout and depersonalization
• Evidence-based medicine must be balanced with understanding what matters to families
• Creating a supportive environment for medical trainees breaks the cycle of toxic education


Connect with Dr. DeMeo on LinkedIn.

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Though I am a physician, this is not medical advice. This is only a tool that physicians can use to get ideas on how to deal with burnout and/or know they are not alone. If you are in need of medical assistance talk to your physician.


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Battle of the Boxes

21 Day Self Focus Journal

Dr. Shah-Haque:

Welcome to another episode of the Worthy Physician. I'm your host, Dr. Sapna Shah-Haque, reigniting your humanity and passion for medicine. With each episode, we bring you inspiring stories, actionable insight and expert advice. Get ready for another engaging conversation that could change the way you think and live as a physician. Your income is your greatest asset, protected with Pattern Life. The easy, stress-free way to find the right disability insurance, with unbiased comparisons and no jargon. Pattern helps you to choose the best policy for your needs. Secure your future today at Pattern Life. The link is in the show notes. Let's dive in. I'm excited about our conversation today.

Dr. DeMeo:

Thanks, yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation, for sure.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

Yeah, and I think you'll bring some interesting perspective and we'll start off first with your journey through medicine, if that's okay.

Dr. DeMeo:

Yeah, absolutely so. My name is Stephen DeMeo. I'm a neonatologist, based in Raleigh, north Carolina. I'm the first in my family that pursued medicine as a career. I always had an interest in pediatric medicine, I think probably as far back as high school when I started to contemplate a career or pathway towards medicine and really just had multiple instances through my undergraduate training medical school. That sort of solidified that interest in pediatrics and pediatric medicine.

Dr. DeMeo:

In the midst of my pediatric residency program I realized that I did enjoy the environment of acute care or more acute pediatric care, and at that time I was sort of in between pediatric critical care medicine or neonatology and was at one of those many crossroads that all of us face career.

Dr. DeMeo:

About which direction I want to go and what I was able to deduce by virtue of having a lot of great mentors in residency was really found my affinity for neonatology. It's an interesting field because so much of our practice is intense critical care, management of infants at the limits of viability, ventilator management, blood pressure management, hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, inborn errors of metabolism, congenital malformations. But contrasted to some of the other critical care specialties like PICU, neonatology is interesting in that, especially for some of our smallest babies, these families may be in our intensive care units for two or three months, and so I get both the stimulation of the critical care aspect of neonatology that I really enjoy with a relative continuity of care with families. That's not seen in other critical care fields. And I really do enjoy that balance because ultimately I think what's been the thing for me in a field where you do deal with death and dying is balancing that with the ability to develop longitudinal relationships with patients and families over time. That's a little bit about my clinical background.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

No, that's fascinating and you know, like you said, the death and dying with some of the most vulnerable and with babies, we should be able to take each and every one of them home healthy. It's not the case for many, and so you brought up a very important point of you can have that relationship, but you also have that balance of being able to maybe process and also humanistically deal with a lot of law.

Dr. DeMeo:

Yeah, and I think something that I've learned in the last few years of my career is that it's actually that human connection with families that helps clarify the clinical situation in some cases. You think how many times in our careers has there been disagreement or conflict in the clinical space that's clarified by something as simple as parking the computer at the side of the hallway and sitting down with a family and figuring out really what's going on? And so I've learned that trying to tie the science and the best practices in evidence-based medicine which is very important to actually just sitting with the humans in front of you and finding out what's really causing the disconnect with the clinical team may be perceiving helps make us all better physicians, and so I strive to not only make sure I'm bringing the best science and the best medicine to the bedside, but also understand the parents and the other caregivers that are in our NICUs.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

Sure, that's tough with the vulnerability with the age group that you work with. Thank goodness for physicians like you that are there.

Dr. DeMeo:

To us in the Neon intensive care unit is often as varied as their diagnosis, sometimes with whether it's infants born at the limits of viability 23, 24 weeks gestation or perhaps not quite as premature. But there's typically been some interface with high-risk obstetrics or maternal fetal medicine, where there's some indication of the parents have started to come to the realization that the pregnancy is not going necessarily the way they had hoped and that the risk of preterm birth is in front of them. Or if you can imagine a mother that's been given a diagnosis of congenital malformation in utero, how that changes her relationship to the pregnancy. And we've met families that have almost been in a state of mourning before they've even met their baby. And when we're able to in many cases repair care for, get an infant to hospital discharge with complicated medical problems, it's quite amazing to see that transformation, that relationship between parents and infant when they're able to move from just the uncertainty of ultrasound images or reading articles about diagnoses but not actually having met that baby yet. And then, on the flip side, we also have to deal with the sort of interruption of what was expected to be a normal birth or a normal pregnancy, where really everything is quote, unquote, okay until the moment that it's not in the delivery room and there's a remercy invitation being undertaken, or even to a lesser degree, when parents have to go speak to parents in the regular newborn nursery and let them know that we've got to.

Dr. DeMeo:

We've got to, unfortunately, leave the mother-baby unit where they're spending all day with their infant, all night with their infant rooming in, and we have to move to a neonatal intensive care setting and sort of just the emotions that come with that, even if, in the grand scheme of things, the baby's going to be just fine. And so you know, that's another challenge that I think is not unique to neonatology. But you know, sometimes the most difficult conversations I have with parents are ones where I actually know that the baby's going to be just fine. And it's hard sometimes when you know that there's another family dealing with death and dying in a bed space a few doors down.

Dr. DeMeo:

How do you care emotionally for a family whose world has been rocked by something fairly minor like transient tachypnea of the newborn or hypoglycemia requiring intravenous fluids, where us, as caregivers, it's very easy to get frustrated and say I can't believe these folks are, why are they so frustrated with us? But you have to. It goes back to that sitting down and meeting the person in front of you and understanding that everybody's experience with illness is different. The peripartum time is just so highly emotional for all involved that it's taken me many years to learn how to navigate around those potential landmines putting my foot in my mouth and still not perfect at it. But learning how to take a deep breath when you feel yourself getting frustrated by your message not getting through is definitely important to kind of sustain your own wellness in this job.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

And so that's something that you learned through several years of practice. Was it more in your attending hood or in fellowship? When did you learn when and where did you learn that?

Dr. DeMeo:

I think, a combination. The difficulty as a trainee is that oftentimes you're not offered those opportunities to develop more longitudinal relationships or have continuity with patients because as you're moving between different services or rotating between different units your attending may have that relationship with a child. You know, okay, I've been taking care of this child with inflammatory bowel disease for their almost their entire adolescence. You're just needing them for the first time and so you as the trainee don't have necessarily that relationship. But I will say that I was lucky enough to train at a wonderful pediatric residency program at Nemours AI DuPont Hospital for Children where it really was the culture of the residency program to model patient and family-centered care and that was sort of the norm. I sort of laugh and it's no offense to my adult colleagues, but I sort of laugh when I see papers published in the literature about the importance of patient-centered or family-centered care in different adult care settings because it's sort of the way we've always strived to do it in pediatric. But I think neonatology fellowship presents the same sort of challenges of you know you're tired a lot. I was doing as a first-year fellow 30-hour calls times a week and in those moments if you look at the sort of jobs to do over the course of the day, whether it's prenatal consults or procedures or admissions or rounding, and there's only so many hours in the day. What piece of that can get sometimes put to the wayside? It's that going sort of the extra miles, understanding the relationship of your families and your patients and their want and their need.

Dr. DeMeo:

I will say that I tried to go out of my way to build those relationships, even as a fellow. But it's different to leave training and become an attending, because those things that somehow would go up the chain you think of when you're an intern and that parent is extremely upset, that it's natural and it's probably appropriate in some cases that you push that kind of to your senior resident. Your senior resident may take care of that collaboration with your attending. And then you find yourself suddenly in that position where, yeah, I'm going to go talk to my, oh, wait, I'm the attending. I have to deal with this. I'm the top of the food chain here in this patient care pyramid. So it is a little on the job, training, and I think that's okay.

Dr. DeMeo:

Again, with all you do to sort of highlight wellness in physicians and how do we reduce burnout and how do we improve resiliency? Some of my own experience has been one of just. I have a group that is really supportive and wonderful. Very much a flattened hierarchy, whether it's a neonatologist that's been with the practice for 20 years or a brand new neonatologist right out of fellowship, and then our relationship with all of our advanced practice providers. Very much a practice dynamic where I can text any one of my partners at any hour of the day, even if they're not on call, to say, hey, can I run this by you? I'm thinking about this and same with difficult clinical situation, difficult communication situation. I'm very blessed to work amongst other physicians in APP who are collaborative, you know, even in that sense.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

Yeah, it's almost like you have a built-in mentorship or at least the collegial respect of, hey, let me run the fight. I think that's part of building a tribe, that's part of building a network, because medicine is really a team approach, even if you're the only one in rural Kansas. I've been on service in the hospital. Back in the days when I did hospital medicine, I always had the two or three attendings in my pocket from residency that I could run things by and it's been very helpful even when trying to get patients transferred, just networking the support, knowledge, navigating complex cases. But even just I have found that there's an unspoken port and mental safety net of I have this bench that I can run things by. That's definitely a blessing.

Dr. DeMeo:

You said something that made me think of another example of where there's always opportunities for physicians to support each other in better ways. You know one of those examples is coordinating neonatal transport. You know so as a fellow at Duke University. Our catchment area was pretty large, everywhere from Southern Virginia to South Carolina to the western part of the state, and many of my fellowship shifts would be holding that transport phone and getting a call from a pediatrician in rural North Carolina who's in a nursery by themselves with a sick baby.

Dr. DeMeo:

And my fellowship program director in our division chief at that time, dr Ron Goldberg, I think, had a very important view of our role in supporting physicians who were calling the transport line, which was very easy when you're at the academic medical center to feel high and mighty and think can't believe they chose that fluid or what are they doing? They didn't send a blood culture. This baby doesn't sound so sick to me. He didn't look at it that way. He said if that person they're not calling you because they don't want to do work, they're probably having the worst day they've had in a while. They probably are in a system where they don't have the supports around them that you do. They don't have three respiratory therapists, two nurse practitioners, a bunch of neonatal nurses who can get access at the drop of a hat he hammered into us as fellow.

Dr. DeMeo:

Your job when you answer that phone is to do everything you can do to help to support and ultimately take the best care of the patient, but also support that physician. I never forgot that, and still to this day, when we get transport referrals from outlying hospitals, especially ones where there's not newborn critical care, and you have a general pediatrician who's coming into the office to manage a baby who's been resuscitated in the delivery room or managed preterm birth, just really remembering, even if there's little things at the margin where you think, okay, I would have done this differently or differently it's all about how can I support this person, how can I answer questions, even if I think the baby's probably not as sick as they're perceiving? It's all about that support in the best interest of the patient, but also just supporting each other as physicians.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. Not everybody sees it that way. So thanks for highlighting that and the listeners. I'd really like to drive home that, yes, even as an outpatient internal medicine doc, if I'm sending somebody for a consult or if one of the hospitalists here, and even if it's rural, there are still standards of care. We still try to stick to the standards of care. So we don't place consult or transfers for giggles because literally we're looking for the next best step. If that were your mom or your dad, how would you respond? And remember we're colleagues. So just remember that we're all colleagues and it'd be great to have that view of how can we support each other. So I'm going to try to hammer that into the room. Try to hammer that into the studio.

Dr. DeMeo:

Yeah, Most of our training programs are at academic medical center type facilities where you've got some specialties at your beck and call when you ask. Is there an opportunity for us to do a better job in training, giving residents and fellows exposures to different environments of care?

Dr. DeMeo:

I think it's so critical and I look back on things that at the time I didn't appreciate as helping form me into the doctor I am today. But even all the way back to medical school, the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, where I went to medical school, had a rural health rotation as part of a required fourth-year experience, and so I, with seven or eight of my classmates, moved for a month to LaPorte, pennsylvania, which is in Sullivan County, central part of the state only about 6,000 people in the whole county and we, with the help of a family practice doc who was at the Sullivan County Health Center, basically staffed this health center. For the month that we were on rotation. We manned an urgent care downstairs where residents could literally come and ring the doorbell if they needed something. And so, as a medical student just being exposed to that simple problem of saying to someone, I think you should go to the emergency department, that decision meant that you were sending them on, you know, in some cases an hour, hour and a half journey.

Dr. DeMeo:

So leaving the practice environment of Philadelphia, where there's five medical schools and you can trip and fall into a level one trauma center, to go essentially learn medicine in Sullivan County for a brief period of time and understand that even those simple disposition decisions am I sending you home? Do you need to go to the emergency department? Become very complicated and then layer in all the things that I'm sure you've dealt with in your practice before, which is, maybe the patient is argumentative with you about that decision. I can't go to the ER, I've got work. I don't go to work, I'm hourly, and so that was my time at the Sullivan County Medical Center directly related to the medical knowledge that I had to attain to become a neonatologist? No, but did it show me realities of practicing in a small town environment where the regional medical center was an hour and a half two hours away? It did, and I think it helped give me an appreciation for how that care environment impacts the decisions that you have to make when it comes to your patients.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

Yeah, I saw a lot of that as well, even in Wichita, kansas, where I did my residency and part of med school, and it's not nearly as big as Philadelphia. It's maybe about 500,000, three to 500,000 within the metro area. Even in the indigent population it's not an uncommon script. You know, if I don't go to work tomorrow, I don't get paid, then I can't pay rent, I can't pay utility, so it's like a decision tree. Okay, this is what I recommend. It's like okay, if you, this is what I recommend, we can do A, b and C. If overnight you don't get better or if it gets worse, then I recommend ER Call and give an update.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

These are the parameters that we're looking at and then you know we'll follow up. At point A, point B and point C we do try to manage can with meeting the patient's goals. The reason why I'm circling back to that is because we as physicians there's a difference between what the patient wants and what guidelines are. But then there's also a lot of gray and I think a lot of times forget how creative we are as human beings and when we can truly connect and identify patients, not necessarily expectations, but meet their needs and where they're at versus. This is what the literature says and we're going to have to do everything that this says and there's no wiggle room.

Dr. DeMeo:

I think it's again. I'm a proponent of evidence-based medicine. It's critical to making sure we're taking the best care of our patients, but I think what was missed in the initial implementation of whether it's clinical pathways or clinical practice guidelines is for many of those whether it's community-acquired pneumonia in the emergency department or whether it's sepsis risk scoring in the newborn nursery we left out that last part, which is there's also a role of talking to your patient's family and saying based on these guidelines, this is what I recommend, but it depends on X, y, z, what's important to you. We've had infants with chronic lung disease who are on low flow oxygen in the NICU and our maybe bias as providers, or our perception, is that we've got to do everything we can to try to get that baby off oxygen before discharge, only to then sit down with the parents and say actually, the thing that's most important to me is to just get home. We'll figure it out. I'm a little scared about the idea of an oxygen concentrator and monitor, but right now the most important thing to me is to get home with my baby, and that totally changes everything.

Dr. DeMeo:

So much misunderstanding or conflict in healthcare comes down to just you just got to sit down and talk to someone and it's hard with all the competing priorities we have. Like you said, documentation EMR I joke, you know, cynically like a parent at Carpool asks what do you do at work? Sometimes I feel like saying electronic data entry because we can. Now we can see graphs of time in the epic chart that are provided to us on dashboards and how can we reconnect? Back to the reason I wanted to become a doctor in the first place was because I find other human beings fascinating and I get to work with them every day, sometimes in the most stressful situations I've ever had. So yeah, evidence-based medicine plus the human element, plus understanding the wants, needs, desires, what's important to your patient. I think that's one thing that excites me the most is that not only precision medicine from a biological standpoint, but can we use technology to get back to a place where patient felt like? Dr DeMeo has been taking care of me for a couple of weeks. He understands where we come from. The care team you know at large understands what's important to us, because that's the other thing.

Dr. DeMeo:

So much of inpatient medicine now is a team sport. I think that's a good thing. I think diverse opinions of the different neonatologists and practitioners I practice with the, creating an environment where nurses and respiratory therapists feel empowered to speak up. They see something that they're concerned about. I think that's really, really critical.

Dr. DeMeo:

You just have to make sure that team-based medicine doesn't come with the problem that a diffusion of responsibility can cause. That's the biggest barrier I think right now, especially in inpatient medicine, is a sense of whether it's from me coming on service on a Monday or whether it's a family reflecting, saying out loud we're not really sure who's running the show here In the days of now that we're in shift-based hospital type roles, shift-based critical care roles, which I think again, some of that balance is important. It's important that we as caregivers have some limits to our work and feeling like we can step away from work. But the downside is that increased handoff, that diffusion of responsibility, that patient not feeling that they're not sure who's in charge of their care, trying to battle that every chance we get, I think is important.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

How do you think we can use technology to get back to more face-to-face time? Patients and the reason why we went into medicine I mean EHRs, I think, have in all the data entry. At least for me they're a pain point because, like you said, we didn't go into medicine To work with that. I would have stuck with engineering. I love talking to patients and the chronicity of issues, things like that. How can we make our lives better by utilizing technology?

Dr. DeMeo:

I'm an optimist. I hear physicians when they cross post articles. But you know, ai is coming for your job. Would want to be a radiologist, would want to be a dermatologist, wouldn't want to be in quote, unquote the cognitive specialties, because we're all here to be replaced. I actually think that this is a really exciting time where technology is presenting the opportunity for us to actually get back to the roots of being healers and being caregivers of other human beings. The EMR is so wrapped up in everything we do.

Dr. DeMeo:

I remember during my fourth year it might have been my third year of medical school- I was rotating with a solo practitioner private practice west of Philadelphia, and her practice had just obtained the charts of another solo practitioner who had unfortunately passed away after a massive stroke unexpectedly. And there's probably another lesson in this, which is, you know, physicians are bad at judging our own mortality. This person had developed no succession plan at nearly 80 years old of what would happen if they were unable to practice. So, essentially, thousands and thousands of patients were now being informed when they called the office that your beloved doc has passed away. Didn't you be cared for by this new pediatrician? And so it was summertime and adolescents who were doing pre-participation physicals were hearing that Dr So-and-so and unfortunately passed away and were coming to the office for the first time. And so one of my jobs as the third year medical student was to go back to the storeroom and find the paper chart that was in a document box. And what was amazing and I'm not saying we go back to exactly this you would have essentially four years of patient visits on. There's some room for maybe a little more precise documentation than that. But where we've gotten now, where the progress note is meant to be not only a communication between physicians but an insurance compliance document, a billing document, a QI document. Its usefulness as a tool to just actually talk about what we think is going on with the patient, I think has run its course. And now you add into that the anxieties around open access to notes from patients, which I'm a proponent of patients having access to all of their information, but it changes the way I think about the progress note, knowing that my baby's families are also reading them. I think opportunities like AI and large language models I think there's an opportunity there to actually take some documentation burden off of us and get back to what feels more like a natural encounter during rounds or during clinic visits, and many hospitals are already piloting AI-enabled software that essentially listens to the encounter and generates a summary, some of the billing compliance, just based on the multitude of data points that are in the chart, so that the progress in itself can actually become what we were taught as medical students that it was supposed to be. This is my perception of this patient in this moment in time and therefore I think they're doing good, better, worse with this diagnosis and therefore my plan is this that we can eventually get back to something that looks more like that. So I think there's a ton of opportunity.

Dr. DeMeo:

The other thing that I'm interested in is just the larger care coordination. Some of my primary care colleagues but some of my pediatric subspecialty colleagues thinking about division of endocrinology they're doing some really incredible things with technology and communication with their patients. You teach a 16-year-old how to use the software that their continuous glucose monitor comes with. They can generate data reports that the endocrinologist can see in real time and then you can make a tweak to your patient with type 1 diabetes electronically. Not even a phone call anymore, just text-based messaging. You don't have to take it out from school, don't have to come to the office. Just that ability to do care coordination in a way that makes intuitive sense for everyone.

Dr. DeMeo:

Now the question is because we work in an environment where for many of my colleagues, their income is derived from productivity-based compensation plans and RVUs. How do we develop a more holistic reimbursement compensation system where the thing that's right for the patient whether it's texting a teenager an update based on CGM trends or whether it's a primary care doctor sending a survey electronically to their 30-year-old patient on Welbutrin that really doesn't need to take a day off work to come into the office? I think there's some huge opportunity there.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

Yeah, and I think one of the biggest arguments physicians have is okay, how do I charge for my time? And I really like what lawyers get to do and that's charge per increment. I can definitely see medicine heading toward that. I do think we need to cut out the power that the insurance company has. But, having said that, I'm an optimist as well. I know the patients that I serve. They want to see a person. They don't want to talk to a robot or anything like that. So we could definitely keep the neurologists and the dermatologists well employed here, but I think they can be great tools. What advice would you have for those listening that are maybe mid-career or even in their journey of training, on how to keep their don't let their image of self get completely run over by the identity of being a physician and the rigors of training?

Dr. DeMeo:

Yeah, and, by the way, I'm in the midst of that mid-career journey. I graduated fellowship 10 years ago, so I'm kind of in that sweet spot of training is a bit in the rear view, but still hope to have many years of fruitful practice. I think, like many things, there's a pendulum to this idea as position, as calling, or profession, versus job or occupation. I think there are times when the altruism of positions can be taken advantage of by employers, this idea that well, this is a higher calling and you chose to be a physician, so therefore you should sacrifice X, y, z because it's a calling, not a job. I have slowly, over the years, gotten more comfortable advocating for myself, for my group, when there are times when the realities of practice sometimes make you feel like I know this isn't right, but I should just do it because it's the right thing to do for the patient. And I'll have to figure out the rest of the downstream effects on me, my family, my partners later and a caveat but I'm really lucky to actually work for a great employer. I work for an independent, non-for-profit health system where, even if we have our gripes for better or for worse, I know we're in the CEO's offices it's downstairs on the first floor. We're lucky to work in that type of system, but I think there is something healthy about saying it's not. Altruism is good, but there has to be some boundaries and I don't want physicians to fall into the trap of it is just an occupation and therefore I'm going to be very transactional with my relationship to my patients and to the health system.

Dr. DeMeo:

What I've found is, you know, I had what is typical for many moments where sort of the novelty of being a new attending wears off and you find yourself, whether it's at the end of a difficult shift or dealing with one of these problems that unfortunately isn't just about patient care, it's navigating the system, it's navigating the bureaucracy and you're starting to feel burnt out or you're starting to feel. For me, my trigger was always and this goes back all the way to residency If I would get a page that a patient doing well, and my initial gut reaction was almost just like, like I didn't care. That was my trigger, that I was like tired or I needed to like reset, because I know that's not me, but that like depersonalization to the patient was my signal that that was I'd hit my limit. So I always look out for my first reaction to know a patient problem, feeling disconnected from wanting to help. So I know how to identify that sort of depersonalization and know that I've got to do something to help myself so that I get out of that as quickly as possible.

Dr. DeMeo:

But I had moments where my instinct was to pull away from the relationships to patient, like if I'm tired and I'm burnt out and I'm not sure if I want to do this.

Dr. DeMeo:

But the safety mechanism is going to be just get the work done, just get the discharge summaries done, get rounds over with, and that'll make me feel better to just get the work done. And what I found was actually the opposite. If I went deeper, if I committed more to the reconnection of medicine, it may make rounds longer but, like I said, put the computer on wheels to the side, sit down in your patient's room, talk to them. Even if it's not, you know, we're running off vital signs and PO percentage and NG feeds if it's actually just talking to them. All of that connection has been really restorative for me in times where I've felt burnt out. And I think it makes sense because my initial affinity to medicine, as we said before, is I just think humans are infinitely fascinating, and so it makes sense that leaning into that connection to humanity actually protects me against the other shenanigans that come with being in a position in 2025.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

Yeah, we have to remember why we went into medicine. Most go into help make people healthier or connect with them. The body is so fascinating I mean, it's the greatest engineered mechanism that's out there and we get to work with that. How cool is that? Just remember that we're humans connecting with another human in a very vulnerable situation and space. I love that, yeah.

Dr. DeMeo:

And the thing that is routine to us, just reminding yourself that you know, there's many of our neighbors that have not faced a crisis in their life and you meeting them is the first crisis they've had in their life. Yeah, I just try to remember that.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

That's such a beautiful perspective, just things that we take for granted. So if listeners wanted to reach out to you and to connect, what's the best way?

Dr. DeMeo:

The best way to reach out to me is I am active on LinkedIn and we'll make sure we post a link to this episode. I'm also still marginally active on, although the platform has gone through a lot of changes over the last couple of years. I'm always happy to hear from folks on email if they have questions about neonatology, medical education, educational technology. I'm also passionate about figuring out how we can make medical education better for those that are coming after us. For those of you that may be in an educational leadership position, I'm always interested in connecting.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

And so to those listening, reaching out to this wonderful human being who happens to be a physician, because I think he's shared a lot of great insight and there is optimism. I'm really enjoying seeing what the younger medical crowd coming through medical school and residency. They have a different view. Things will get better slowly, but things will get better.

Dr. DeMeo:

I think I'd love to join you again sometime down the road and talk about medical education, because it's another area where I think technology just offers the opportunity for us to totally reimagine what will mean and what medical students need to learn versus what information is now readily available to us, and I think getting that right is going to be key to a healthy physician workforce in the future.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

No, I would love to do that especially. I do. I'm volunteer faculty at KU and I'm also adjunct faculty at the School of Osteopathic Medicine here in Wichita. I would be fast and sit down and have that conversation.

Dr. DeMeo:

That would be wonderful Because I reflect back. I'm like I still know what it's like. It hasn't been that long. And then you realize it's been a while and their experience is probably a lot different than mine.

Dr. DeMeo:

Yeah, that's something your listeners should also consider. If they've got medical students or residents in their practice, have some sympathy for them. It's easy to label the new generation as being soft or not having it like we did, but they've got a lot of pressure on them that we didn't have as medical students. When I was a second year, I think, I studied for step one, maybe a month, and now something like USMLE Step 1 prep is something that encompasses them for a year a year and a half because it's so high state, and the main year around Step 2 and the score that you need to be a competitive residency applicant. So there's a lot that our medical students are facing and a lot of it has nothing to do with learning how to take care of patients. Unfortunately, they're just responding to the set of information they have in front of them, the incentives they have in front of them. Be kind to your learners. They're going to be taking the reins from us and we have to figure out how we can support them better.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

No, thank you for bringing that up. I 100% agree. These are beautiful human beings that are still green and I despise the culture of well, this is the way it was done to us and so it's just. It is what it is and come on we can remember how malignant at some point in time, medical school and residency their points. Not that that was my whole experience. For the most part, I love that. I keep in touch with most. But don't be that attentive. Don't be that attending they're hardworking individuals. They didn't go in there for grins and giggles and money. We can go into economics or finance or do something that is less high risk and less debt. The love of God, you bring a medical student, I'll bring a medical student. We'll have a panel. Steve, thank you so much. I really appreciate it, and make sure that we have the links in the show notes to the episode and to connecting with you, and we'll do this again. I'll send you a follow-up email later on today, if that's okay.

Dr. DeMeo:

Thank you for doing what you do and raising your voice about these issues. Thank you very much. Happy summer.

Dr. Shah-Haque:

Thanks for tuning in to another episode from the Worthy Physician Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who'd love it too. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube, linkedin, instagram for more updates and insights. Until next time, keep inspiring, learning, growing and living your best life.