Physician Burnout! A disturbing trend

Since my last post about my late Grandfather, I didn’t have the motivation to write; but then I thought about all of the times he encouraged me to write, it reminded me to follow my passion, so here I am with my thoughts again, this time on the disturbing trend of Physician Burnout.

Over the last 7 years since the time of the “Great EMR Implementations”, we have always discussed physicians retiring because they did not want to learn technology and use the EMR. I put it down to older physicians not keeping up with the times. I’m not so sure about that anymore.  The reason being that one of my friends who is a physician went through a very visible burnout episode that surprised everyone recently. She said that she was working until the middle of the night trying to keep up with documentation and it finally became too overwhelming for her to take. This surprised me tremendously. This wasn’t something that happened to younger, more savvier physicians…or so I thought. In a June 29th, 2017 article in the Harvard Business Review, points such as loneliness at work is also a factor that is identified as the reason for burnout (it doesn’t discuss physician burnout in particular though). Similarly, in a June 22nd article in Time Magazine, titled “Doctor’s on Life Support”, it starts by saying that “Doctors are stressed, burned out, depressed, and when they suffer, so do their patients. Inside the movement to save the mental health of America’s doctors“. The  signs of stress are evident. IT departments can and should do more to collaborate with clinic practices and primary care and specialties to help develop efficiency within the every day use of technology. Technology “A-Teams” should be identified to work with their physicians, understand the challenges that they are facing, whether in the EMR, wireless “dead zones” in clinics that drop the connection, old laptops and PCs that need to be updated, that sometimes may mistakenly be attributed to an EMR deficiency or other areas where the process can be smoother for the physician and/or clinic staff.

All of us as Healthcare Information Technology professionals needs to bear in mind that we need to do all we can do reduce and eliminate physician burnout and improve the processes for the physician so that we can enable them use technology for better, faster and more efficient patient care. The burden of EMR documentation should be lessened and, at the end of the day, it will be the patient that will gain and the quality of care will increase with a happier, less stressed, care provider.