About
Physicians are trained to take care of patients. Very little prepares them for everything that comes with being a physician.
I understood that more clearly when I started working in private practice. Alongside clinical work came scheduling, administration, documentation, finances, contracts, accounting, marketing, and the practical decisions involved in managing work across different clinics. I currently practice in two very different places: a private clinic, where I work as a child psychiatrist, and a hospital, where I am training in clinical pharmacology as a second specialty. I had spent years learning how to practice medicine. Nobody had taught me how to run the business side of being a physician.
The notebook
Loguaron started in residency, as a notebook that fit my coat pocket, because nothing else held both jobs together. The notebook grew into a structure, and the structure survived enough real weeks to become something I could hand to someone else. That version is the workbook.
The first version of Loguaron was much less ambitious. During residency, I carried a notebook that fit in my coat pocket because I needed one place to keep track of patients, calls, and the practical work moving between my different jobs.
Later, when I moved into private practice, the problem became larger. Practicing medicine and running a medical practice were not the same job. I looked for tools that could help and found plenty built around healthcare, but surprisingly few built around the physician.Even something as simple as searching for a patient planner brought up planners for patients preparing for doctor visits or tools designed for other healthcare professions. What I was looking for was much simpler: something designed around the way a physician actually works. The notebook gradually became a structure. The structure became a way to organize the work in front of me while keeping enough of a record to look back and understand how that work was actually going. That became the starting point for Loguaron. As Loguaron developed, I also looked at research on clinical workload, physician burnout, decision-making, and the operational problems that shape medical work. The Research section explains the evidence that informed parts of the system — and where the evidence stops. Today, I build practical tools for physicians from the perspective of someone doing the work: tools that recognize the patients, tasks, documentation, administrative responsibilities, different practice settings, and decisions that exist around the clinical encounter, not just the encounter itself. Healthcare rightly asks physicians to take good care of their patients. I believe we should also build better tools to support the people doing that work. Physicians take care of patients. Loguaron takes care of physicians.