At the ICD Media Group’s Healthcare Burnout Symposium, healthcare thought leaders dove into the origins of and continuing reasons for clinician burnout. Experts on designing for empathy, clinician well-being, organizational transformation, patient experience, human suffering, moral injury, and physician resilience shared ideas and evidence-based solutions for helping the healthcare workforce.
As your organization confronts clinician burnout and looks to support your employees’ well-being, consider these issues:
- The need to align patient and clinician experience efforts. The patient and clinician experience are closely related, yet patient and clinician experience teams tend to operate independently, creating goals that are not aligned. Healthcare leaders can’t improve one without strong consideration of the other. For example, responding to publicly reported HCAHPS Survey scores can have limited impact when a health system also needs to improve the clinician’s experience. To break this habit and maximize initiatives, leaders of both teams must join forces to align goals and assess the impact of initiatives on patients and clinicians.
- Technology again makes few headlines. As an analyst, I see many tech firms with products that augment clinician productivity, some of which are underrated, but relationships are at the center of clinical care. Acknowledging social connection among clinicians is at an all-time low. There needs to be more discussion around technology’s role in alleviating burnout and transitioning to more relational encounters. To do this, clinicians need to be aware of digital health tools and vendors need to gather feedback on the efficacy of these tools.
- A call for sludge removal on the front lines. Before adding anything else to clinicians’ plates (i.e., new initiatives to mitigate burnout or new technology to help with productivity), teams need to remove wasteful activity. Start with a de-implementation list to remove the excessive amounts of sludge that have built up in healthcare. This can reduce cognitive load, remove distractions, and clear minds to focus on what matters most — providing effective patient care.
Organizations will succeed in enhancing clinician well-being by fostering social connectedness and emphasizing clinician-patient relationships.
If you’re interested in learning more about clinician burnout or workforce technology, check out related Forrester research below or schedule a guidance session. For all other questions regarding research or how to become a Forrester client, please email sgermain@forrester.com.
