Core Versus Chore: Using Human-Centered Design to Solve Burnout and Inefficiency in Healthcare

Description

What if healthcare could run smoother — and your team could thrive — instead of barely surviving?

Modern healthcare is overwhelmed by inefficiency, burnout, and tech overload. Promises of revolutionary tools often leave practices drowning in complexity, while staff morale plummets and patient outcomes suffer. But what if the issue isn't the technology itself — but how we think about the work?

Core Versus Chore, a groundbreaking book from Grace Terrell, MD, MMM, FACP, FACPE, flips the script on healthcare improvement. Using human-centered design principles, Terrell delivers a real-world framework to separate what truly matters — the core mission of patient care — from the endless administrative and technological chores that hold teams back.

This isn't theory. It is a battle-tested, practical guide from someone who has lived the challenges of healthcare leadership firsthand. Packed with actionable strategies, Core Versus Chore equips healthcare leaders to untangle inefficiencies, prevent burnout, and harness the transformative power of AI and technology.

This Book Can Help You:

• Identify technologies that streamline workflows instead of creating more chaos
• Address the friction points that drain your team's energy before they spiral into fatigue
• Turn the rapid pace of change into a strategic advantage, especially in the age of AI
• Lead innovation with confidence and stop patching problems — start solving them at the root

What Is Inside:

Part One — Reimagine the Chores to Fortify the Core: Examine the unnecessary chores and information chaos dragging healthcare teams down, then rebuild with more efficient clinical, administrative, and value-based care workflows — reclaiming the core mission of patient care.

Part Two — Human-Centered Design Will Improve Healthcare: Apply human-centered design principles to fight bias, rethink financial systems, address moral injury and gendered burnout, and redesign the healthcare team — from precision medicine to population health and whole person care.

Geared Towards:

• Physicians stepping into leadership roles
• Healthcare administrators craving sustainable solutions
• Clinical practice managers battling inefficiencies
• Health system executives navigating technological disruption

Whether you are a seasoned leader or just starting your journey, Core Versus Chore delivers clarity, confidence, and tools to help you lead smarter, not harder. Because your patients deserve better. Your team deserves better. And so do you.

About the Author

Grace E. Terrell, MD, MMM, FACP, FACPE

Grace E. Terrell, MD, MMM, FACP, FACPE, is a national thought leader in healthcare innovation and delivery system reform, and a serial entrepreneur in population health outcomes driven through patient care model design, clinical and information integration, and value-based payment models.

She is chief medical officer at IKS Health, an international healthcare company designing simple solutions for the complex problems in healthcare, using the "core vs. chore" framework. She has been a practicing general internist for more than thirty years. She has served as CEO of several companies, including Eventus WholeHealth, LLC, a company focused on providing holistic care to medically vulnerable adults, and Cornerstone Health Care, one of the first medical groups to make the "move to value" by lowering the cost of care and improving its quality for the sickest, most vulnerable patients. She was the founding CEO of CHESS, a population health management company, and the former CEO of Envision Genomics, a company focused on the integration of precision medicine technology into population health frameworks for patients with rare and undiagnosed diseases.

Terrell has served as vice chair of the U.S. DHHS' Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee, the chair of the board of the AMGA, and is a founding member of the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center. She is the author of several books, including Value-Based Care and Payment Models, Reframing Contemporary Physician Leadership: We Started as Heroes, and Strategies for Recognizing and Eliminating Gender Bias for Healthcare Leaders. She is currently executive in residence at Duke University School of Medicine's MMCi Program, a senior advisor for Oliver Wyman Health and Life Sciences consulting practice, and a member of the board of trustees of Guilford College.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Introduction: Imagine the Practice of the Future

Part One: Reimagine the Chores to Fortify the Core

Remembering the Core

1. Unnecessary Chores
2. Information Chaos
3. Requirements for Fixing Healthcare Delivery
4. More Efficient and Effective Clinical Workflows
5. More Efficient and Effective Administrative Workflows
6. More Efficient and Effective Value-Based Care Workflows
7. The Important Difference Between Professionalism and "Top of License"
8. Scope of Practice
9. Designing the Well-Functioning Clinical Team
10. Your Mission Is Your Core
11. What Has To Be Done Where?
12. Identify the Chores
13. Pajama Time Is Evil
14. Platforms Can Diminish Chores
15. The Purpose of Clinical Documentation and Its Devolution
16. Clinical Documentation Is a Chore
17. Don't Let Clinical Decision Support Become a Chore
18. When Did Primary Care Become Just Screening and Referring?
19. Reclaiming the Core

Part Two: Human-Centered Design Will Improve Healthcare

Rebuilding Healthcare

20. Human-Centered Design: Building Systems That Heal, Not Harm
21. Using Human-Centered Design and Humans-in-the-Loop to Fight Bias in Healthcare
22. The Five Stages of Health Information Technology
23. Design-Integrated Virtual and Digital Health
24. From Vision to Action: Strategy, Tactics, and the Future of Healthcare
25. It's Moral Injury, Not Burnout
26. Burnout Is Gendered: The Disproportionate Toll on Women Physicians
27. Redesigning Healthcare's Financial Engine: Solving the Hidden Drivers of Dysfunction
28. Hospitals as Airports: Rethinking Healthcare through System Design
29. Global Human Capital and Pragmatic Technology
30. Rethinking the Healthcare Team: Beyond the Lone Physician
31. Patients vs. Consumers
32. Precision Medicine Is Patient-Centered
33. Population Health and the Rubik's Cube: A Framework for Human-Centered Redesign
34. Fixing Our Broken Healthcare System by Understanding Non-Western Culture's Approaches to Health and Well-Being
35. Design for Wellville: A Human-Centered Approach Beyond the Social Determinants of Health
36. Whole Person Care Matters in the Total Cost of Care
37. How Medical Needs Are Evolving Faster Than the System Can Keep Up

Acknowledgments

References