The Stanford Doctor and Scientist Surveys

Stanford remains committed to improving the wellness and professional fulfillment of our doctors. In order to make progress, we need to hear your perspective.  A high response rate is vital, not only to ensure that the results accurately represent the experience of Stanford's physicians, but also because it ensures that your voice is heard. You play a key role in Stanford Medicine’s success. Your responses guide our efforts to increase efficiency in your practice, build a culture that supports wellness and professional fulfillment across Stanford Medicine, and enhance quality of care for our patients.

 The survey is administered by a third-party organization, and your individual responses remain confidential. Only anonymous, de-identified data is shared with Stanford.

When we began our well-being efforts, it was apparent that assessment of physicians’ well-being status and contributing factors was necessary on a regular basis. Such evaluations help us to understand and to monitor the state of our physicians and their most pressing concerns, as well as to provide a vehicle for assessing the effectiveness of pilot studies and creating evidence-based interventions.

To that end, Mickey Trockel, MD, PhD, has led the development and validation of many scales in the survey to measure clinician wellness and professional fulfillment.

Due to the interest in our survey nationally and in our desire to create a data repository for physician well-being, we have created a Physician Wellness Academic Consortium (PWAC) to support other academic institutions in their well-being needs. PWAC assists medical organizations in longitudinal assessment of their medical providers and determination of internal need for interventions. The Consortium offers the survey to multiple provider types, including physicians, residents, fellows, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants. These collaborations enable us to provide Stanford with external benchmarks from peer institutions as context for our own survey results.

The survey is being administered by a third-party organization, SullivanLuallin Group, an independent survey administrator with extensive health care survey experience and expertise.

Since this survey is a Medical Staff quality initiative, California Code 1157 protects responses from legal discovery. Disclosure cannot be required even in a court of law. In addition, our current practices to protect your personal information include, but are not limited to, the following:

SullivanLuallin Group will conduct the survey through ServiceSTAT, a proprietary online survey administration, database and reporting tool. The ServiceSTAT survey tool is a cloud-based tool for creating and administering online surveys. The database will be stored using the resources of Microsoft’s Azure on a password-protected, encrypted computer system that is HIPAA compliant and has limited access and is in a locked office in a controlled facility.

Your personally identifiable data associated with this survey will not be available to any Stanford employee and will be accessible only to limited personnel appointed to manage the data and the IT personnel who maintain the data at the SullivanLuallin Group. 

Stanford Medicine will adhere to the laws and policies in place to protect the confidentiality of your personal information. Your personally identifiable information will NOT be shared with Stanford Medicine.Your anonymized information will become part of a database that will be used to generate aggregate results and survey reports. Identifiable data will not be released for any reason. Data released for any approved purpose will first be de-identified by removing any personal identifying information including combinations of demographic, department, or academic rank information that are unique to any group of fewer than five individuals.

Click here to view our full privacy statement.

Our online surveys identify you by your e-mail address, which will be used by our third party administrator SullivanLuallin Group to confidentially link your responses across time. This survey collects information regarding professional fulfillment, burnout and their drivers, and suggestions for improvement. You may skip any question you prefer not to answer, choose "Prefer not to answer" where applicable, or go back and change your selections before submitting the survey.

Your responses will be used primarily for the purpose of helping Stanford Medicine take data-driven actions to improve our practice environment to improve both the quality of care we provide as well as our the well-being and professional fulfillment of our clinical faculty, residents, and fellows. Your personally identifiable data will not be available to any Stanford employee. Only your deidentified data will be shared with Stanford. Data collected from this survey will be used for the following additional purposes, as permitted or required by law, including:

·  Improving quality of care and teamwork across Stanford Medicine

·  Providing norms against which sub-groups can be compared

·  Suggesting recommendations for to inform programming to improve well-being for physicians, doctoral clinical faculty, residents, and fellows

·  Evaluating relationships between wellness variables as well as demographic and professional characteristic to enhance efforts to improve wellness

·  Applying for, and/or justify, funding for programs that will help promote well-being for physicians, doctoral clinical faculty, residents, and fellows

When used for these purposes, your survey data will be combined with the data of other respondents, as well as data collected from other sources, and subjected to aggregate data analysis and reporting to groups and individuals within Stanford Medicine. No personally identifying information will be included in such reports.

You can email us at wellmdcenter@stanford.edu if you would like your data changed or removed from our database, or for any other questions or concerns. After a data set has been rigorously de-identified, we will not be able to remove individual respondents’ data from the de-identified data set.

All doctoral level faculty with clinical responsibilities are invited to take the Stanford Doctor Survey^TM, including members of the university tenure line, medical center line, clinician educator, and adjunct faculty (assistant professor, clinical assistant professor, associate professor, clinical associate professor, professor, clinical professor).

The survey is administered on a regular basis.

The survey should take about 10-15 minutes to complete.

An email invitation from Stanford Medicine Chief Wellness Officer < surveys@sullivanluallingroup.com> is sent to Stanford Medicine physicians with a personal link to the online survey. Periodic email reminders, containing the same personal email link, are sent to those who haven’t responded until the survey closes. The survey can be completed in one session or partially or in multiple sessions using the same link.

If you have trouble finding the survey invitation email or reminders, please search your inbox or spam folder using #2020DoctorSurvey to help with retrieving the email survey link.

The overall Stanford Medicine results are shared with physicians via email. The results of each Department are reported to the Department Chair and Dean Lloyd Minor. Results are also shared with all physician well-being stakeholders as relevant.

You can send your question, suggestion, or concern to wellmdcenter@stanford.edu.

Subsets of the survey that are published and available for use are the Stanford Professional Fulfillment Index (PFI) and Self-Valuation measures. Nonprofit organizations are permitted to self-administer the PFI without modification for research or program evaluation. Please email wellmdcenter@stanford.edu to obtain these documents.

We do not grant any third-party group permission to administer the survey.