Pros
Being a large organization I am able to interact regularly with other specialists/health care providers and learn from them. We have access to medical records from other MedStar Health appointments though there is rarely time to search for records and the application isn't easy to use. MedStar has equipment that most other clinics do not: ZeroG, exoskeleton, driver rehab simulations, a working kitchen. If there is a medical emergency, which happens frequently, we can call a rapid response and medical teams will be over in about 5 min. There is very generous time off though it accrues painfully slow. There is no deductible, low premiums, and low copays for the MedStar Health appointments though it can take hours to schedule health appointments. MedStar has maternal and childcare benefits too. Patients are seen one on one and the expectation is 7 patients or 30 units/day (which is surprisingly rarely met as no show/cancellation rate is about 30% due to systemic barriers and almost all patients are Medicare or Medicaid). We have patient insurance specialists and schedulers to assist clinicians.
Cons
What they say and what they do are entirely opposite. The management cares about profits over anything else and profits come before patients and definitely before associates. Therefore, turnover and burnout is a significant issue. We had 8 people leave in just 1 month and they can never hire quickly enough so remaining clinicians are stuck scrambling. They don't take any accountability in turnover and instead say the clinicians "lost their passion." They tend to replace incredibly skilled clinicians with new grads despite treating the most medically and socially complex patients and therefore clinicians are put in a vulnerable position where they have to treat complicated patients without mentorship. Management is quick to throw clinicians under the bus in front of patients and their families even if they were not present for the event in question. You are expected to be available at all times to take patients and often you are given other evals or treatments when patients do not show. Patients often come incredibly late or on the wrong day and nobody is supposed to be turned away so someone is supposed to see them. The DEI group EPIC is given no real power and associates of color are treated so poorly. Microaggressions and macroaggressions are everywhere. The management takes zero accountability for unsafe/uncomfortable situations or systemic barriers to care and blames clinicians or patients for everything. I had a patient fall because MedStar failed to notify patients of construction. My director said that because the patient has fallen before and nobody made them walk through the grass, that MedStar had no responsibility. When you ask for help you are ridiculed, scoffed at and shamed. They reward poor leadership and poor ethics and punish innovation. They are reactive instead of proactive and often action takes months to years if it ever comes. There are tons of extra job duties without being given time to do them like peer reviews every quarter (have to read all of the notes for a Medicare and non-Medicare caseload and fill out a long survey about it to rate each other's documentation), being a part of a committee to make improvements to operations, tracking and reporting productivity manually. They rarely monetarily reward hard work (if you get a good Google review, which most patients cannot figure out how to do, then you are entered in a raffle to earn $10; you get $15 for every extra patient seen but it is nearly impossible with our cancellation rates; almost everyone gets the standard 3% raise each year since only 2 can get a 6% raise and the past two years they haven't done that due to COVID.) They do not track COVID cases among outpatient patients or associates so that they can brag that there was no transmission of COVID-19 anywhere in the network ever during the pandemic despite many of my colleagues and I getting it. For the longest time we were not even able to get tested if we were asymptomatic. They care more about optics than true safety.
