Episode 79: Let’s Turn the Tables – What If We Measured Them

In this episode, Dr. Junaid introduces a thought experiment that starts with humor but quickly becomes serious: what if administrators were measured the way physicians and APPs are? Drawing on his dual role as a practicing med-peds physician and ambulatory IS medical director, he walks through a series of metrics all applied to a composite character he calls VP Jones. The exercise reveals a concept called administrative harm, defined in a 2022 New England Journal of Medicine article and studied across 32 organizations in JAMA Internal Medicine, where only 9% of participants said their organization encouraged transparency in administrative decision-making. Dr. Junaid argues the real problem isn’t that administrators are bad people, but that they make decisions without feedback loops, and without a scoreboard, indifference and ignorance look identical from the clinician’s perspective. This is part one of a two-part series; next week he’ll explore what the scoreboard could actually look like and what happens when you measure the human cost of administrative decisions.