Physician Health & Wellbeing — COVID-19 and Beyond
Colleague Interview: A Conversation with Natalia Dorf-Biderman, MD
D
r. Dorf-Biderman is an Internal Medicine practicing hospitalist at Methodist Hospital, Park Nicollet/Health Partners. She received her MD degree from Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo, Uruguay, and completed her internal medicine residency at the University of Minnesota. She is currently the medical director for Clinical Documentation Integrity and chairs the Hospital Wellbeing Committee. While promoting personal wellbeing programs in the workplace, she works to look at practice and documentation inefficiencies that add friction to clinical practice and seeks to find attainable solutions. In partnership with the MMA, she is currently chairing the Physician Wellbeing Advisory committee where leaders and champions from across the state collaborate to develop programs to impact the health and wellbeing of clinicians throughout Minnesota.
How is it you came to Minnesota from Uruguay? I was born and educated in Uruguay, attending medical school at the Universidad de la Republica, School of Medicine where I received my MD degree. During the 2004 economic recession, I moved to Santiago, Chile, to work and continue training in Internal Medicine. While living there, the Pan-American Maccabiah games, an athletic and cultural event for Jewish people from around the world, was held. I was one of the physicians organizing the medical and health response. Quickly, I was assigned as the physicians’ liaison with all the English-speaking medical directors. That’s where I met my husband, who was the medical director for the American delegation. A year later, we were married and moved to Boston for his fellowship in Palliative care. After completing the recertification process from Step 1-3, I again started an Internal Medicine residency at the University of Minnesota, and we have been here since.
Medical care delivery is organized differently in Uruguay and Chile. Are there practices that Minnesota physicians might apply to their advantage? There are so many differences in healthcare delivery in South America that it deserves a whole article itself. The biggest one is probably healthcare costs and access both with and without insurance. The public healthcare system is basically free, albeit with different resources than the insured sector, but no one goes without access to medicine for fear of bankruptcy. Additionally, from an access standpoint, communicating with your medical team is so much easier. You might even be able to text with your clinicians and, in most instances, get a same-day or next-day 10
Winter 2021
appointment. When you have a long-standing relationship with your physicians, and they know what matters to you as a patient, the care is much more personalized. I can’t recommend specific changes in practice to consider, but broadening their perspective as to how things can be done by either practicing abroad — which I know is hard to accomplish — or going to international conferences and engaging with international teams can spark a myriad of ideas of how to do things differently.
Have you been in touch with the community in Uruguay about Covid-19? Yes. My whole family still lives in Uruguay, and I have many friends and colleagues still practicing there. I am always paying attention to how my home country and surrounding areas are doing with COVID-19 in terms of transmission and the pandemic response implementation. The pandemic hit Minnesota earlier, and so, especially in the early days, we communicated a lot about what we were seeing at home in terms of numbers or transmission. Now, topics of discussion have mostly switched to vaccine acceptance, hesitancy, and recommendations. Personally, it has been fascinating — I would even go as far as to say — educational — to see the striking differences among communities and countries. Technology and social media have significantly impacted communications and have made the world a smaller place. This is both for the good and bad — unfortunately, misinformation is rampant, so it has been vital for me to share trustworthy and scientific information that is culturally sensitive so people can hear it. MetroDoctors
The Journal of the Twin Cities Medical Society
