Even before the pandemic, physician burnout cost America $4.6 billion annually. Given the emotional and physical toll of the pandemic and the nation’s healthcare workforce shortages, that number is likely much higher today.
It’s not just doctors who are affected. Nurses, medical assistants, technicians and other hospital workers also left in droves. Each resignation increases the workload for those who stay, making it more difficult for healthcare workers to focus on the professional part they were originally drawn to: helping patients. More work, less enjoyment, more departure – the vicious cycle keeps going.
Burnout Expert Dr.Dake Drummond Compare burnout to an energy bank account. Burnout occurs when you constantly draw energy from your account for work and activities, without replenishing your account with rest and rebalancing. Ultimately, Dr. Drummond points out, there are only two ways to prevent burnout: “Either reduce stress in your work life and larger life, or improve your ability to recharge.”
Burnout is often addressed through policy measures (such as work hour restrictions) or behavioral changes (such as yoga and meditation). However, one of the most effective antidote to burnout may actually be technology. There are at least three ways in which technology can reduce the stress of healthcare jobs and improve employee recharge.
Hand the extra work to the digital assistant
Headcount planning and staffing is a huge challenge for any healthcare system. Staffing must be planned months in advance while keeping an eye on fluctuations in patient demand and competitive pressures. In terms of hiring, the health system now faces an extremely limited supply of labor and a sharp rise in wage expectations. Unfortunately, none of these trends appear to be going away anytime soon. Recent research suggests that more workers will leave the healthcare industry in the coming years, while rising wages in other industries will continue to put pressure on healthcare employers.
Thankfully, much of the manual work done in healthcare today does not need to be done by humans, but can be safely performed by software robots (robots), also known as digital assistants.
Of the hundreds of manual processes performed every day in healthcare, from pre-authorization submissions to care gap identification, I estimate that about 60% to 70% of them can be offloaded to intelligent digital assistants. When infused with artificial intelligence capabilities such as optical character recognition and natural language processing, these software robots can handle high levels of complexity and large volumes of data, making it easy to perform advanced tasks such as viewing patient charts to identify open care gaps or following up on claims and prior authorization.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of digital assistants is that they are elastically scalable, which means you can grow your workforce when demand increases (such as an Omicron wave) and scale down when patient numbers decrease. Digital assistants are already automating millions of manual, repetitive tasks in other industries, and it won’t be long before health care.
Improve alignment between clinical work and clinical training
There is a marked inconsistency in healthcare between what clinicians spend their time doing and what they are trained to do. Research Shows that about 50% of physician work time is spent on EHR, while only 27% is spent directly on patients. In medical school, however, physicians spend little time learning how to use EHRs more effectively and spend almost all of their time learning how to diagnose and consult patients. Thousands of medical students graduate each year looking to practice their newly learned bedside skills, but they spend hours a day in front of electronic medical records they don’t have the ability to use. This mismatch between clinical training content and the reality of the job can be exhausting.
Giving mundane tasks to digital assistants isn’t just about reducing workload; it allows doctors to refocus their time on what they did in the industry — treating patients. By spending more time on enjoyable patient interactions and less time on administrative tasks, clinicians can fuel, recharge, and regain a sense of purpose. Intelligent automation provides a way for organizations to start this transition.
Improve your ability to improve patient health
Caring for a sick person often feels like a Sisyphus-esque task, pushing a boulder up a hill only to find it toppled again – a chronic disease that continues to develop, despite your best efforts, many of the same patients deterioration. This can be very frustrating for clinicians, many of whom are always able to get out of the woods, whether it’s getting into medical school or taking a challenging exam. But when it comes to patients, more effort doesn’t always lead to better outcomes. There are so many things out of the individual practitioner’s control – patients will show up, will they take their medication, will they follow up with the specialist you refer them to? Imagine having 10,000 tasks on your to-do list every day and not having any impact on any of them.
With modern technology, individual clinicians do not have to bear this burden alone. Imagine having a team of virtual medical assistants who can reach each of your patients when they need to receive care, stop refills, or need to schedule a referral. Automation makes this a reality. Clinicians can increase their ability to care for patients by leveraging software to perform repetitive, high-volume, and error-prone tasks that would otherwise take up a day.
Burnout is common across healthcare and can get worse. While policy measures and behavioral change can be effective ways to reduce burnout, health systems must also leverage technology because it can be very effective at reducing workload, recharging clinicians, and increasing capacity.
Photo: People Pictures, Getty Images
