Are Clinicians Really Burning Out From Poor EHR Usability?
In the previous blog article, we encountered physician burnout as a burning topic in healthcare. In this article, we explore the problem to understand what role technology can play in solving it before moving on to the requirements for an AI-based solution in future blog articles. Let’s get started.
The first physician we spoke to as part of our user research was a leading obstetrician in a large healthcare system in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first words out of her mouth were “Clinician attrition and burnout is the top issue for me and my CEO”. That surprised us, but not as much as what she said next. She also stated that technologies they use, specifically EHR systems, make her team’s life harder, not easier because they were difficult to use. This, in her opinion, was a major contributor to burnout. Therefore, from a clinician’s perspective, burnout was a problem partly caused by technology. For the naïve technologists in us, who think technology is always the solution, I realized there was more to the problem than meets the eye and we needed to spend more time understanding the problem.
Our first priority was to find additional evidence corroborating the anecdotal problem statement we were hearing from the dozens of clinicians we spoke with. The trouble is usability and burnout are both difficult to quantify and are context dependent. However, biomedical scientists investigate a large number of areas and are prolific publishers as evidenced by the fact that over a million papers are published in PubMed every year, with the number increasing by 8-9% every year. A recent paper published by Melnick, et al, reported a direct association between EHR usability and physician burnout. They used the most widely used metrics to measure usability and burnout, which we will go over briefly before getting to their results.
