The Conundrum of Reducing Physician Burnout
Physician burnout is a serious and growing concern in hospitals and physician practices across the country. As physicians work longer hours and take on more and more responsibilities, they are facing an increasing amount of stress, exhaustion and dissatisfaction with their jobs.
This burnout is having a serious impact on patient care, staff satisfaction, and the quality of their personal lives.
Hank Duffy, CEO of JHD Healthcare Partners, a management consulting firm that specializes in reducing physician burden, explains, “it is increasingly important for healthcare leaders to take steps to reduce the workloads of their physicians, in order to help them reduce or avoid burnout.”
So, how can we reduce physician workloads? According to Duffy, they find the most impactful areas where this can be done are:
Finding and improving the physicians EHR user experience.
Reengineering workloads to increase automation, streamline processes and create workflows to monitor processes.
Improving the clinical support staff alignment.
Training the clinicians to minimize work ping-ponging.
Creating methods for evaluation and implementation of continuous improvements.
“These are just a few of the many ways that hospitals and physician practices can begin to address the issue of physician burnout. However, it is important to identify specific areas alongside your physicians where improvement can be made and to take steps to implement those changes,” continues Duffy.
Communication and collaboration between leaders, physicians and staff leads to success across the board. Providing physicians with the opportunity to talk openly about their issues and asking for their expertise on how to solve it will go a long way in creating an improved workplace culture … which is another key to reducing burnout.
There are many causes for burnout, and ways to evaluate how to improve physician burden. It’s a matter of accepting workload reduction as a priority and determining where to start.
Need help identifying where to begin with improving physician workload?
JHDHP, in conjunction with Forward Health, provides a datacentric approach to materially reduce physician workloads. If you’d like to learn more about our tool and how it can help to reduce physician burnout, schedule a demo today.