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Physician Assistants - Their Vital Role in the Care Experience
Henna Dracopoulos talks about “Physician Assistants - Their Vital Role in the Care Experience”. Ms. Dracopoulos describes the different roles that physician assistants have, their role in the clinical care team and she shares her experience working as a physician assistant at Duly Health and Care.
Featured Speaker:
Henna Dracopoulos, PA
Henna Dracopoulos, PA is a Duly Health and Care Physician's Assistant, Department of Urology. Transcription:
Physician Assistants - Their Vital Role in the Care Experience
Duly Noted, a health and care podcast, is the official podcast series of Duly Health and Care. Each podcast features physicians or team members discussing groundbreaking topics and innovations that help listeners re-imagine and better understand an extraordinary health and care experience.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Hello, everyone. I'm pleased to welcome you to another episode of Duly Noted, the official podcast of Duly Health and Care. I'm Dr. Paul Merrick, the Chief Physician Executive at Duly. I've been practicing urology for nearly 30 years. And for the past decade, I believe, I've had the privilege of working alongside an outstanding medical professional and my guest today, Henna Dracopoulos. Henna is a physician assistant at Duly. She plays an instrumental role in the care of the urology patients and within my practice. She's here today to discuss the vital role of physician assistants, her associates, as some are starting to call in the practice of medicine today and into the future. Welcome, Henna.
Henna Dracopoulos: It's a pleasure to join you today.
Dr. Paul Merrick: So Henna, we work together closely for some time now. Tell me a little bit about yourself for everybody to hear and how long you've been working at Duly.
Henna Dracopoulos: My name is Henna Dracopoulos. Thank you for having me today. I am married with two kids in high school. I've lived in DuPage County almost my entire life with hopes that Duly will be expanding to the Florida coast sometime soon. But I've been a PA for 20 years, began my career in surgery, and then I was a pediatric PA prior to joining Duly Health and Care about 10 years ago. So I've had the opportunity to watch Duly morph into this massive largest independent physician-directed medical group these past 10 years.
Dr. Paul Merrick: So Henna, tell me about the path to becoming a PA and how that might be different from a nurse practitioner.
Henna Dracopoulos: Okay. Well, at the practice level, there are more similarities than differences. The differences are that PAs are educated in a general primary care medicine, which offers a comprehensive view of all aspects of medicine. General medicine teaching means PAs can switch specialties throughout their career without the need for recertification, whereas nurse practitioners typically choose a population focus. They would choose women's health or family medicine or pediatrics, for example. Also, PA curriculum is modeled on a medical school platform where nurse practitioners are trained in the advanced practice of nursing. But again, at the practice level, they're very similar.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Helpful. That makes sense. As a PA, different days, you may have different roles and responsibilities. Tell me about the spectrum of different activities that you may have on one given day versus another.
Henna Dracopoulos: Every day is different. On some days, I am in the office working in a clinic. On other days, I'm in a hospital rounding on inpatient. Many days, I'm in the operating room assisting in robotic surgeries. And, in the office, I even do many minor surgical procedures autonomously.
Dr. Paul Merrick: One of the things that we've been thinking about and talking about is the workforce of the future and how does the clinical care team work together as one unit with different roles and responsibilities focusing intently on patient care. What is the physician assistant role in that clinical care team, if you would share?
Henna Dracopoulos: It's dynamic, it's collaborative. Physician assistant and/or a nurse practitioner, APPs in general, work closely with the providers helping provide better access, easing physician burden, giving patients more opportunity to be seen quickly and promptly. And then as far as a team player, a physician assistant or a nurse practitioner or any APP works with the entire team, for example, the physicians, the other APPs, the ancillary staff, medical staff, surgical care, surgical schedulers. We all work as one giant team.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Yeah, it's remarkable. Over the years, if you and I care for a person or a patient together, it's common that I'll introduce and make a warm handoff to you. And it seems like oftentimes the patients would prefer to continue their care with you because you do such a wonderful job. You do a great job in education and relationship development. And because we have such a focused area, my sense is there is almost a similar amount of your logic knowledge in the care that you provide. It's really extraordinary. So healthcare has been complicated, certainly since 2020 with a pandemic and such. How can PAs help address what is becoming a shortage of clinical workforce and physicians overall?
Henna Dracopoulos: Yeah, you're right. You're right. All indications are pointing towards like an upcoming significant workforce shortage of physicians in the near horizon. And in order to sustain the trajectory and growth that Duly's expecting, I truly believe that APPs will be pivotal in filling that gap to provide access and patient care.
Dr. Paul Merrick: In our department, I feel like we have unique team model and the PAs are so helpful in terms of creating that access. Other than prompt ability to see and get clinical information, what are the advantages that you see that patients experience when they have the privilege of seeing someone such as yourself?
Henna Dracopoulos: Well, like you said, shorter wait times for the patients. I believe that our APPs in our department are typically allotted more time to spend with their patients. So the advantage of being seen by a PA is you'll get to spend more time with your provider, shorter wait time, which is better access. Sometimes an APP can even offer same-day availability, which in turn increases patient satisfaction, which is commonly proven by our Press Ganey scores. And then meanwhile, we're easing physician burden, which frees up time for the physician to expand their existing practice.
Dr. Paul Merrick: I think one example that is very helpful-- so I've diagnosed a lot of people over the years with prostate cancer, we have an extraordinary surgical and radiation program. And if somebody is to consider surgery, my understanding is that they'll spend a preoperative visit with you to understand exactly in great detail what happens to the day before, what happens to the day of, when their followup is, when they transition off the catheter, and what sort of things they can do to help position themselves for a speedy recovery. Is that something that you enjoy particularly above some of the other roles you provide?
Henna Dracopoulos: I do. These are patients who were recently diagnosed typically with like a cancer, prostate cancer, kidney cancer, what have you. And so they're nervous and they're overwhelmed and it's hard to, you know, grasp what's going on. It's hard to believe it's really happening. So those pre-surgical visits, I think really enhance patient satisfaction and confidence. We guide them how to, you know, go over the prep and prepare for surgery, what to expect during surgery, what to not be so, you know, concerned about or what is important, what's not important after surgery. And I can't tell you how many times after surgery patients will say, "Wow, it was exactly like you told me it was going to be." "It's exactly how you, you know, explained it. Thank you so much for warning me that blood in the urine is normal" or "Thank you so much for your warning me that scrotal swelling is normal because if I hadn't known that I would have panicked." And I do enjoy pre-op counseling, post-op counseling a lot.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Yeah. My experience is it's the fear of the unknown. You hear the word cancer and it invokes all kinds of emotional responses and the better we can prepare and equip somebody for those what we may view as very subtle recovery-related events. But if they're not understanding that these things are typical and part of a normal recovery process, then it creates unnecessary anxiousness and to sort of mitigate that on the front end, I think is just so helpful. So you get to do a lot of different things. And urology is a neat specialty in that we take care of a wide spectrum of patients. Is there anything that you find to be the most challenging aspect of your work right now currently?
Henna Dracopoulos: I love my job. I would say the most challenging aspect of maybe everyone's job is time management. There's just not enough minutes in the day from all the MyChart messages to checking labs, completing charts, running to see an inpatient consult in between outpatient visits. But I wouldn't change a thing. I love it.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Yeah. You're very good at it. So if you were to pick one thing out that you think is truly the most exhilarating, the best part of a workweek, is there anything that comes to mind?
Henna Dracopoulos: I would say the minor surgical procedures that I get to do in office, like a testosterone pellet implant.
Dr. Paul Merrick: We've shared a number of patients that way as well. So you do very well with that.
Henna Dracopoulos: Thank you.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Is there any particular patient journey that you'd like to share that would sort of explain the personal interaction that you have with people? Patients seem to appreciate your work so much, they seem to come bearing gifts often.
Henna Dracopoulos: I would say there are amazing interactions every day. So yesterday, I saw an elderly lady who was complaining of stress incontinence, and I had some extra time. So we had the opportunity to fit her for a pessary, which is like a little suppository intravaginal that you place intravaginal to help support the bladder. It can sometimes help with stress incontinence. So she was just over the moon when her stress incontinence was miraculously fixed. She started crying. I started crying. I don't know why I started crying. But everybody was just so happy. And it's just so rewarding. Patients are so thankful. We're just doing our job, but I feel like we're truly changing lives. I miss the pre-pandemic hugs though. I do miss hugs. I also was the leader on receiving hugs.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Yeah, I think that might be true. So you had work experience before you came to work with us. Is there anything particular about Duly and our team that you would encourage others to potentially consider evaluating us if they are a PA or a nurse practitioner as a career partner?
Henna Dracopoulos: Yes. Duly is a great place for an advanced practice provider to work. They have adequate onboarding, adequate training. Like I mentioned, I've been a PA for 20 years. I've had jobs where you start and, the very first day, you're just thrown into that job; where here, they take pride in taking their time and onboarding slowly, making sure we are adequately trained, which, you know, behooves them because then they have a more skilled and perfected APP.
Also, there's a lot of APP support. They're starting to redesign an Advanced Practice Provider Advisory Board, where the APPs meet quarterly. We get our CMEs. We get to meet each other. We have, I believe, like around 200 APPs that work for our organization right now and almost a thousand physicians. So it's a huge group with a lot of comradery a and everybody is available to everyone. We have access to a teams website on our homepage where we can talk to anyone. If you want to reach out to an ortho PA or if you want to reach out to a derm PA, you have many of them at your fingertips. So it's a really great place for an APP to work. A lot of support, a lot of comradery and a lot of partnership.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Henna, I cannot thank you enough for agreeing to work with me, first of all, for the last 10 years. It's really been a delight and a privilege.
As we close, I want to thank you and really all of the physician assistants and nurse practitioners at Duly Health and Care for delivering such wonderful personalized, attentive care to our patients in our communities. There's plenty of opportunities to help people flourish at Duly Health and Care. If you're interested in joining the team, we'd love to help you blossom and grow as a healthcare professional.
So, thank you everybody for listening to Duly Noted, the health and care podcast. Again, Henna, it was a delight and a privilege the last few minutes, but more importantly, the last decade of working together. It's my privilege. Thank you so much.
Henna Dracopoulos: Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Merrick. Thank you everyone. And I am proud to work here.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Have a great day, everybody.
Physician Assistants - Their Vital Role in the Care Experience
Duly Noted, a health and care podcast, is the official podcast series of Duly Health and Care. Each podcast features physicians or team members discussing groundbreaking topics and innovations that help listeners re-imagine and better understand an extraordinary health and care experience.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Hello, everyone. I'm pleased to welcome you to another episode of Duly Noted, the official podcast of Duly Health and Care. I'm Dr. Paul Merrick, the Chief Physician Executive at Duly. I've been practicing urology for nearly 30 years. And for the past decade, I believe, I've had the privilege of working alongside an outstanding medical professional and my guest today, Henna Dracopoulos. Henna is a physician assistant at Duly. She plays an instrumental role in the care of the urology patients and within my practice. She's here today to discuss the vital role of physician assistants, her associates, as some are starting to call in the practice of medicine today and into the future. Welcome, Henna.
Henna Dracopoulos: It's a pleasure to join you today.
Dr. Paul Merrick: So Henna, we work together closely for some time now. Tell me a little bit about yourself for everybody to hear and how long you've been working at Duly.
Henna Dracopoulos: My name is Henna Dracopoulos. Thank you for having me today. I am married with two kids in high school. I've lived in DuPage County almost my entire life with hopes that Duly will be expanding to the Florida coast sometime soon. But I've been a PA for 20 years, began my career in surgery, and then I was a pediatric PA prior to joining Duly Health and Care about 10 years ago. So I've had the opportunity to watch Duly morph into this massive largest independent physician-directed medical group these past 10 years.
Dr. Paul Merrick: So Henna, tell me about the path to becoming a PA and how that might be different from a nurse practitioner.
Henna Dracopoulos: Okay. Well, at the practice level, there are more similarities than differences. The differences are that PAs are educated in a general primary care medicine, which offers a comprehensive view of all aspects of medicine. General medicine teaching means PAs can switch specialties throughout their career without the need for recertification, whereas nurse practitioners typically choose a population focus. They would choose women's health or family medicine or pediatrics, for example. Also, PA curriculum is modeled on a medical school platform where nurse practitioners are trained in the advanced practice of nursing. But again, at the practice level, they're very similar.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Helpful. That makes sense. As a PA, different days, you may have different roles and responsibilities. Tell me about the spectrum of different activities that you may have on one given day versus another.
Henna Dracopoulos: Every day is different. On some days, I am in the office working in a clinic. On other days, I'm in a hospital rounding on inpatient. Many days, I'm in the operating room assisting in robotic surgeries. And, in the office, I even do many minor surgical procedures autonomously.
Dr. Paul Merrick: One of the things that we've been thinking about and talking about is the workforce of the future and how does the clinical care team work together as one unit with different roles and responsibilities focusing intently on patient care. What is the physician assistant role in that clinical care team, if you would share?
Henna Dracopoulos: It's dynamic, it's collaborative. Physician assistant and/or a nurse practitioner, APPs in general, work closely with the providers helping provide better access, easing physician burden, giving patients more opportunity to be seen quickly and promptly. And then as far as a team player, a physician assistant or a nurse practitioner or any APP works with the entire team, for example, the physicians, the other APPs, the ancillary staff, medical staff, surgical care, surgical schedulers. We all work as one giant team.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Yeah, it's remarkable. Over the years, if you and I care for a person or a patient together, it's common that I'll introduce and make a warm handoff to you. And it seems like oftentimes the patients would prefer to continue their care with you because you do such a wonderful job. You do a great job in education and relationship development. And because we have such a focused area, my sense is there is almost a similar amount of your logic knowledge in the care that you provide. It's really extraordinary. So healthcare has been complicated, certainly since 2020 with a pandemic and such. How can PAs help address what is becoming a shortage of clinical workforce and physicians overall?
Henna Dracopoulos: Yeah, you're right. You're right. All indications are pointing towards like an upcoming significant workforce shortage of physicians in the near horizon. And in order to sustain the trajectory and growth that Duly's expecting, I truly believe that APPs will be pivotal in filling that gap to provide access and patient care.
Dr. Paul Merrick: In our department, I feel like we have unique team model and the PAs are so helpful in terms of creating that access. Other than prompt ability to see and get clinical information, what are the advantages that you see that patients experience when they have the privilege of seeing someone such as yourself?
Henna Dracopoulos: Well, like you said, shorter wait times for the patients. I believe that our APPs in our department are typically allotted more time to spend with their patients. So the advantage of being seen by a PA is you'll get to spend more time with your provider, shorter wait time, which is better access. Sometimes an APP can even offer same-day availability, which in turn increases patient satisfaction, which is commonly proven by our Press Ganey scores. And then meanwhile, we're easing physician burden, which frees up time for the physician to expand their existing practice.
Dr. Paul Merrick: I think one example that is very helpful-- so I've diagnosed a lot of people over the years with prostate cancer, we have an extraordinary surgical and radiation program. And if somebody is to consider surgery, my understanding is that they'll spend a preoperative visit with you to understand exactly in great detail what happens to the day before, what happens to the day of, when their followup is, when they transition off the catheter, and what sort of things they can do to help position themselves for a speedy recovery. Is that something that you enjoy particularly above some of the other roles you provide?
Henna Dracopoulos: I do. These are patients who were recently diagnosed typically with like a cancer, prostate cancer, kidney cancer, what have you. And so they're nervous and they're overwhelmed and it's hard to, you know, grasp what's going on. It's hard to believe it's really happening. So those pre-surgical visits, I think really enhance patient satisfaction and confidence. We guide them how to, you know, go over the prep and prepare for surgery, what to expect during surgery, what to not be so, you know, concerned about or what is important, what's not important after surgery. And I can't tell you how many times after surgery patients will say, "Wow, it was exactly like you told me it was going to be." "It's exactly how you, you know, explained it. Thank you so much for warning me that blood in the urine is normal" or "Thank you so much for your warning me that scrotal swelling is normal because if I hadn't known that I would have panicked." And I do enjoy pre-op counseling, post-op counseling a lot.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Yeah. My experience is it's the fear of the unknown. You hear the word cancer and it invokes all kinds of emotional responses and the better we can prepare and equip somebody for those what we may view as very subtle recovery-related events. But if they're not understanding that these things are typical and part of a normal recovery process, then it creates unnecessary anxiousness and to sort of mitigate that on the front end, I think is just so helpful. So you get to do a lot of different things. And urology is a neat specialty in that we take care of a wide spectrum of patients. Is there anything that you find to be the most challenging aspect of your work right now currently?
Henna Dracopoulos: I love my job. I would say the most challenging aspect of maybe everyone's job is time management. There's just not enough minutes in the day from all the MyChart messages to checking labs, completing charts, running to see an inpatient consult in between outpatient visits. But I wouldn't change a thing. I love it.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Yeah. You're very good at it. So if you were to pick one thing out that you think is truly the most exhilarating, the best part of a workweek, is there anything that comes to mind?
Henna Dracopoulos: I would say the minor surgical procedures that I get to do in office, like a testosterone pellet implant.
Dr. Paul Merrick: We've shared a number of patients that way as well. So you do very well with that.
Henna Dracopoulos: Thank you.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Is there any particular patient journey that you'd like to share that would sort of explain the personal interaction that you have with people? Patients seem to appreciate your work so much, they seem to come bearing gifts often.
Henna Dracopoulos: I would say there are amazing interactions every day. So yesterday, I saw an elderly lady who was complaining of stress incontinence, and I had some extra time. So we had the opportunity to fit her for a pessary, which is like a little suppository intravaginal that you place intravaginal to help support the bladder. It can sometimes help with stress incontinence. So she was just over the moon when her stress incontinence was miraculously fixed. She started crying. I started crying. I don't know why I started crying. But everybody was just so happy. And it's just so rewarding. Patients are so thankful. We're just doing our job, but I feel like we're truly changing lives. I miss the pre-pandemic hugs though. I do miss hugs. I also was the leader on receiving hugs.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Yeah, I think that might be true. So you had work experience before you came to work with us. Is there anything particular about Duly and our team that you would encourage others to potentially consider evaluating us if they are a PA or a nurse practitioner as a career partner?
Henna Dracopoulos: Yes. Duly is a great place for an advanced practice provider to work. They have adequate onboarding, adequate training. Like I mentioned, I've been a PA for 20 years. I've had jobs where you start and, the very first day, you're just thrown into that job; where here, they take pride in taking their time and onboarding slowly, making sure we are adequately trained, which, you know, behooves them because then they have a more skilled and perfected APP.
Also, there's a lot of APP support. They're starting to redesign an Advanced Practice Provider Advisory Board, where the APPs meet quarterly. We get our CMEs. We get to meet each other. We have, I believe, like around 200 APPs that work for our organization right now and almost a thousand physicians. So it's a huge group with a lot of comradery a and everybody is available to everyone. We have access to a teams website on our homepage where we can talk to anyone. If you want to reach out to an ortho PA or if you want to reach out to a derm PA, you have many of them at your fingertips. So it's a really great place for an APP to work. A lot of support, a lot of comradery and a lot of partnership.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Henna, I cannot thank you enough for agreeing to work with me, first of all, for the last 10 years. It's really been a delight and a privilege.
As we close, I want to thank you and really all of the physician assistants and nurse practitioners at Duly Health and Care for delivering such wonderful personalized, attentive care to our patients in our communities. There's plenty of opportunities to help people flourish at Duly Health and Care. If you're interested in joining the team, we'd love to help you blossom and grow as a healthcare professional.
So, thank you everybody for listening to Duly Noted, the health and care podcast. Again, Henna, it was a delight and a privilege the last few minutes, but more importantly, the last decade of working together. It's my privilege. Thank you so much.
Henna Dracopoulos: Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Merrick. Thank you everyone. And I am proud to work here.
Dr. Paul Merrick: Have a great day, everybody.