Health information technology and clinician burnout: Current understanding, emerging solutions, and future directions

Extract

Burnout among healthcare providers has been increasingly recognized as a significant problem.¹ The National Academy of Medicine has defined burnout as “a syndrome characterized by high emotional exhaustion, high depersonalization (ie, cynicism), and a low sense of personal accomplishment from work.”² The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality similarly defines Burnout as a long-term stress reaction marked by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a lack of sense of personal accomplishment.³ Clinician burnout is both costly and has been associated with reduced job satisfaction, quality and safety of care, and patient health outcomes.⁴ Burnout is common—affecting between 35% and 54% of U.S. nurses and physicians and between 45% and 60% for medical students and residents.²

Research to date has identified a number of contributing factors as associated with burnout.⁵ Among these, health information technologies (HITs) are often implicated. Electronic health record (EHR) systems, for example, are often seen as cumbersome to use, failing to fulfill the promise of improved healthcare delivery, and little more than a means of meeting regulatory and billing requirements.⁶ However, there remains considerable debate in the informatics community as to the actual role health information technologies play in the problem of clinician burnout.⁷ Existing research suggests that technologies may be confounded with other important causes, including regulatory mandates, clinical volumes, increasing hyperspecialization among healthcare providers, and a mismatch between the incentives driving system designers and purchasers and those driving providers. Regardless of the role information technology plays in clinician burnout, innovative solutions to prevent or mitigate burnout are urgently needed.