It’s no secret that healthcare has a clinician burnout problem.

In fact, prior to the pandemic, 42% of physicians reported being burned out – a slight decrease from previous years, according to the American Medical Association. But, like many problems that existed pre-COVID-19, the pandemic only added to the issue, since 49% of physicians said they felt burned out during the last year, the AMA found.

Some experts have pitched that one of the saving graces during the pandemic – digital transformation in healthcare – could also be used to ease clinician burnout. But others aren’t so sure, and think that emerging technologies could actually be adding to the problem.

A group of former and current providers convened today in a HIMSS21 Global Conference Digital Session to discuss how digital transformation can be both contributing to and alleviating burnout.

Beyond what’s going on in healthcare, digital transformation is happening in nearly all aspects of life, making it more difficult to separate from technology, Isil Arican, MS, the director of Ambulatory EHR Services at Stanford Children’s Health, said during the panel.

“We have emails, we have Slack and Teams, and people message us and ask things at any time of the day,” she said. “So I think, similar to that, there is an issue with disconnecting or being able to disconnect in all of the digital domains.”

While technology can at times make workflows easier for providers, it can also put unfair expectations on them, according to Dr. Jennifer Lightdale, the vice-chair of the Department of Pediatrics at UMass Memorial Children's Medical Center.

“Patients expect that they can reach me through a portal and I’m going to get back to them very quickly. And that’s absolutely a change in massive dynamics, and it’s hard to remember all the patients is the bottom line,” Lightdale said during the panel.

“So even if all the information is right there, I can get in, use an app to get into the electronic health record. It’s still exhausting. I think that the toll on clinicians is still just being understood as it’s happening. So it’s very difficult.”

Burnout has broad-reaching effects, both clinically and personally, for providers, Lightdale said. Initially, it can appear as though the burned-out provider is just feeling negative and doesn’t enjoy being at work.

Eventually, that can turn into medical errors and poor health outcomes for patients, divorce, difficulty taking care of their kids, feeling like a failure, or self-harm, according to Lightdale.

Or, as in the case of Dr. Emily Oken, a professor in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School, it can prompt clinicians to step away from their practice. She stopped practicing medicine when her organization made the switch from its in-house EMR to a national commercial EMR.

“There was a pretty direct correlation, the amount of time and energy, and money and effort, that was spent implementing this new EMR,” she said during the panel. “It just wasn’t worth it to me, to be honest, given that I was a part-time provider and I was at 20% in the clinic. And I swapped that out for 20% education time and my quality of life improved dramatically.”

How organizations choose to handle their providers’ feelings of burnout will differ from place to place. For example, at Stanford – where Arican works – they use informatics like granular data, observational data and surveys to find providers that are at high risk for burnout to create personalized solutions for each person.

It’s also done a lot of multidisciplinary collaboration to support clinicians, such as by leveraging IT to help patients set up their telehealth call, creating the Home 4 Dinner program that helps decrease providers’ out-of-clinic documentation time, and running an inbox-optimization program.

Regardless of the methods an institution chooses to help its physicians feel more at ease in the workplace, the panel agrees that the most important factor is listening to providers and allowing them to be in the conversation.

“In the end, I think we’re all saying it, but it is about recognizing that there are forces that are both for the better, but really have these downstream effects on people,” Lightdale said. “So we need to be super careful [about] burning out our physicians as we try to continue to make our technologies better and better, which I’m all for doing. But it should also be to make physicians’ lives better, not lose them in the process.”