With the introduction of Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs), clinicians have run out of leisure. Earlier, Sunday evenings for physicians were all about spending quality time with family or relaxing with friends. Nowadays, they are either in patient consultations or looking at the computer screen, updating the EHRs. This affects their work-life balance, leading to physician burnout.
Doctors do not join medical schools to become data entry clerks. As the administrative workload increases, so does the total number of burned-out healthcare professionals. With the compromised provider productivity, the overall quality of healthcare is also being affected. Clinicians are now relying on AI medical scribe services to rediscover themselves. This blog by ScribeMedics will outline the health and professional implications of physician burnout and the role of AI medical scribes to prevent it.
What Is Physician Burnout?
Burnout is a state of mind where individuals do not feel connected to reality due to mental exhaustion. This exhaustion may come from extreme work pressure and a lack of breaks in between. While anyone can experience burnout, healthcare practitioners are more prone to it.
Higher physician burnout rates reflect a decline in the quality of care. This can result in increased mortality due to medical negligence or delayed treatment. The signs of physician burnout are important, as they can help identify professionals who are burned out. They can be provided with relevant solutions to overcome this challenge.
Physician burnout symptoms include constant fatigue, headaches, emotional unavailability, loss of enthusiasm, cynicism, gastrointestinal problems, frequent loss of temper, lack of motivation, low self-esteem, etc. If you are facing any of these or know anyone experiencing these symptoms, you must learn about the causes of physician burnout.
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What Causes Burnout in Healthcare?
The health sector is evolving with time, but burned-out professionals cannot contribute to its growth. It is time to explore some of the leading causes of physician burnout.
1. Long work hours
Doctors spend long duty hours, especially those working in the ER. They devote prolonged time to their duty, and often skip their meals too. Hectic shifts along with irregular meals and sleeping cycle make a negative impact on their health. If this pattern repeats, it may lead to exhaustion and thereby cause physician burnout.
2. Administrative Tasks
Clinicians distribute their work hours between patient consultations and administrative tasks like charting, documentation, etc. These are highly important to ensure quality care delivery. As they are piled up with these tasks, it takes over their free time, too. This results in zero work-life balance and work fatigue, eventually causing physician burnout.
3. Loss of autonomy
At times, the hospital authority is not supportive enough. As a result, clinicians face a tough time carrying out their duties. Lack of control over schedules, pressure from management, etc., make the physicians feel mentally stressed. This loss of autonomy and control gives rise to a number of burned-out healthcare professionals.
4. Inadequate resources
Poorly designed work systems result in friction among the employees. Besides wasting valuable time, the inadequacy of required healthcare resources can keep doctors from providing accurate care. For example, useful equipment is not present at the facility, or there is a shortage of lifesaving drugs. These situations can make the clinicians feel helpless. As they are unable to provide optimal care due to resource constraints, it may lead to burnout.
5. Moral distress
The health sector is not for the weak. A practitioner must endure human suffering on a daily basis. It is not just about bloody wounds; it can be an elderly bedridden patient suffering from bed sores, or a child going through cancer treatment. When a doctor is responsible for checking them on a regular basis, it affects their mental state too. This moral distress is a key source of physician burnout. Also, sometimes, they blame themselves when a patient dies of a terminal illness. This is another contributing factor.
6. Lack of support
Staff shortage is a serious concern in the healthcare sector of the USA. In some rural facilities, the patient-provider ratio is alarming. As a handful of physicians are in charge of hundreds of patients, a service delivery gap is inevitable. Also, poor support from upper management may lead to employee dissatisfaction, leading to work stress. A practitioner with a low satisfaction level is more prone to burnout.
7. No recognition
Healthcare is a demanding sector, with a very low scope of rewards. It is common for healthcare professionals to feel deprived of recognition. Lack of appreciation can make clinicians feel undervalued. They might also feel undercompensated after spending long, hectic duty hours ensuring positive patient outcomes. This is another cause of burnout.
8. Mental Health Stigma
Healthcare professionals may feel low or mentally exhausted. But the social stigma around mental health may keep them from seeking essential care. Therefore, the work stress will be left untreated and eventually take the form of physician assistant burnout.
Understanding The Administrative Burden Behind Burnout
Among all the causes found from the physician burnout statistics, it is evident that excessive administrative workload is the key cause, which is somehow contributing to the other causes, too. Let us understand why the administrative burden behind burnout is a major challenge here.
- After completing their work, physicians spend at least 1 or 2 hours looking at their computer screens and updating electronic health records. During their self-care or family bonding time, they have to drown in redundant clicks and templates. These data entry jobs make them feel exhausted and stressed.
- Prior authorization is a roadblock that keeps providers from enabling superior patient outcomes. Besides delaying care, it replaces their patient consultation time with arguments with the insurers.
- Rigorous paperwork can turn the practitioner’s head from “healing” to “billing”. Claim denials and complex reimbursements can take a toll on clinicians’ health as they struggle with audits and repeated paperwork.
- Penalties are any doctor’s nightmare. Hence, they want their practice to align with the relevant regulations. However, the changing regulatory landscape can result in multiple reworks, paving the way towards physician burnout.
How Physician Burnout Affects Patient Care?
Whenever a clinician experiences burnout, their patients suffer too. Imagine Dr. Shelly is severely burned out due to hectic work hours. Now, she has recently taken charge of 4-year-old Anne, who is suffering from stage 2 blood cancer. Dr. Shelly is drowned in the symptoms of physician burnout. Unaware of her condition, she often misses her appointments, thinking she will get better if she rests. However, Anne’s condition deteriorates due to delayed care.
Similarly, a patient visits a doctor with the expectation of becoming healthy again. If the doctor himself or herself needs care, then patients have no one to turn to. An unwell physician with poor productivity can never treat with accuracy. Medical negligence or documentation errors are inevitable. Therefore, it is important to recognise physician burnout and take immediate measures to ensure faster recovery. Otherwise, untreated burnout can make an individual suicidal.
Traditional Solutions to Burnout & Their Limitations
Physician burnout solutions are essential to ensure the overall well-being of doctors, as well as their patients. While the traditional solutions can be effective, they have their own share of limitations. Let us explore further.
1. Mindfulness Practice & Resilience Training
Mindfulness helps to cope with mental exhaustion. The physicians are trained for stress management to keep burnout at bay.
Limitation:
- Does not fix broken systems, solely focuses on building adaptation
- A short-term solution that eventually fades with missed sessions
- Does not make an impact on depersonalization.
2. Self-care Podcasts & Wellness Apps
Listening to videos or podcasts related to self-care and signing up for wellness apps can bring relief. These apps help in maintaining a proper meditation, sleep, and meal cycle, fostering overall well-being.
Limitation:
- Low engagement is common due to reluctance from the physicians
- These apps do not consider the time constraints of clinicians and keep adding “tasks” such as yoga
- Rarely has there been any development in treating burnout among practitioners.
3. EHR Optimization
Providers can be trained on electronic health records handling. This will help them complete administrative tasks faster using resources like templates.
Limitation:
- While it helps to reduce clicks, it does not manage the mounting administrative burden. Physicians still need to spend maximum time updating electronic health records.
- This method overlooks mandates by the insurance companies. For example, prior authorization, quality metrics, and billing codes.
4. Mental Health Breaks
Short breaks for mental wellbeing can work great in providing doctors with the leisure they miss. They can go for 4-5 day-long vacations to rediscover their will and productive self. Short meditation sessions are also good for bouncing back.
Limitation:
- Not every time are leaves approved, given the demanding nature of the health sector in the United States.
- Pending emails and messages boost stress further once they rejoin work
- Stigma associated with mental health prevents them from taking such leave.
5. Peer Support Groups
These groups can provide doctors with a platform to open up, overcome the mental health stigma, and share their challenges. They can listen to the problems shared by others and understand they are not alone.
Limitation:
- Venting without any structural change will be no good to keep burnout at bay
- Most physicians are piled up with work, which forces them to skip these sessions often, thereby affecting the progress.
6. Leadership Training
Leaders must be taught about empathy. This will keep them from imposing long shifts, which is the key cause of physician burnout. They will be encouraged to make unbiased decisions and be empathetic to the medical staff.
Limitation:
- Knowledge will bear an effective outcome only if the concerned individuals implement it in real life too.
- Power imbalance exists in the health sector, which prevents even the frontline doctors from making workflow-related decisions.
- The rewarding structure often follows financial gains, not employee satisfaction.
What Is AI Medical Scribe?
Advanced technology has revolutionized healthcare for good. An artificial intelligence medical scribe is perfect proof. It is known that virtual scribe services help with medical documentation. As these scribes work remotely, they can support multiple physicians with administrative tasks. When AI is incorporated in scribing services, it speeds up the work.
An AI medical scribe is a digital tool or software that enables providers to complete documentation quickly. They listen to the patient-provider conversation and transform the information into clinical texts. However, AI does not guarantee error-free documentation and only speeds up the process. Human oversight is compulsory to ensure optimal outcomes of medical AI scribe.
Role Of AI Medical Scribes In Combating Physician Burnout
It is important to focus on prevention rather than learning about how to manage the symptoms. AI medical scribes play a key role in preventing physician burnout. Some of the major ones are discussed below:
- Uses ambient listening during patient encounters and generates clinical notes based on that. Automation of note creation decreases charting time to a great extent.
- Helps to reduce pajama time (i.e., when clinicians spend additional time beyond their work hours to complete administrative tasks). It allows clinicians to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
- Auto-populates the fields in electronic health records, summarizes consultations, and extracts diagnosis and treatment plans. Hence, the providers can give more time to patient care.
- With AI taking care of documentation, the clinicians can finally look away from their computer screens. They can observe the patients and add their remarks in the EHRs for an accurate treatment plan.
How ScribeMedics Can Help
ScribeMedics, the best AI medical scribe company in the USA, can help prevent physician burnout and foster quality care. The organization has come up with the World’s first hybrid AI medical scribe to aid practitioners in managing administrative workload. This model effectively combines human oversight with artificial intelligence to enable accurate documentation.
While a scribe AI medical helps to manage bulk charting, it is not completely error-free. In the meantime, a remote scribe focuses on overall accuracy, which might impact their speed. The hybrid AI medical scribe models bring together the best of both worlds and provide a permanent solution to “how to fix physician burnout?”.
Here, AI notes down the clinical information, and a human scribe checks it to correct errors. This helps to speed up the work without compromising its quality. Clinicians can opt for ScribeMedics’ hybrid AI medical scribe model to streamline their workflow and overcome burnout.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is physician burnout and why is it a growing concern?
Healthcare is a demanding sector where the staff work 24*7 to ensure patient safety and well-being. It is common for doctors to work for prolonged hours without any breaks. Also, they do not get many leaves due to staff shortages in some locations. This eventually leads to physician burnout. This is generally a feeling of disconnection from all the things that used to light up the mood previously. A feeling of emotional exhaustion that never seems to leave, resulting in a poor state of mental health.
Physician burnout can mentally and emotionally drain a healthcare practitioner. As they feel psychologically drained, they become less productive at work. The patients under their care are less likely to receive proper treatment. Mental exhaustion has an impact on their physical health, too. This affects their lifestyle; they become prone to absenteeism. Delayed care and wrong diagnosis are some of the key factors experienced by patients under burned-out practitioners. ScribeMedics can help improve the quality of care delivery through accurate documentation.
2. How does documentation contribute to physician burnout?
With the rising burden of healthcare in America, it has become more important than ever to understand its drivers. Administrative burden is one of the leading causes of physician burnout. Medical documentation takes up several hours of clinicians’ time each day. They have to allot pajama time to complete these administrative tasks. As they spend maximum hours drowned in these tasks, it affects their mental health and self-esteem. They hardly find any time to spend with family or friends, resulting in zero work-life balance.
This is a continuous task and results in fatigue. As time goes by, they become less productive at work. Hence, they skip consultations, causing delayed care and inaccurate treatment. All these factors have an impact on their physical health too. They suffer from headaches, weakness, etc. All these collectively contribute to the signs of physician burnout. ScribeMedics’ hybrid AI medical scribe model can help keep burnout at bay.
3. What role do AI medical scribes play in reducing administrative burden?
Digital tools powered by artificial intelligence help physicians to speed up their administrative tasks. This leaves them with more spare time to attend to more patients. An AI scribe medical speeds up the documentation process so that doctors do not have to opt for pajama time. A scribe AI listens to the patient encounters and transcribes the data into clinical texts. Hence, clinicians can spend their whole time focusing on patient outcomes.
With reduced administrative burden, physicians do not have to look at their computer screens during visits. Therefore, they can closely observe the patient and diagnose their health problems based on that. As a medical scribe AI aims to reduce the EHR updation-related workload, the doctors can enjoy a healthy work-life balance. This improves their overall health.
4. How do AI scribes improve physician work-life balance?
Scribe AI uses artificial intelligence to improve healthcare workflow efficiency. An AI medical scribe automates documentation, which enables the providers to complete bulk work at once. While physicians lose a lot of time in charting, an artificial intelligence medical scribe helps clinicians overcome the administrative burden.
Although AI automates the documentation process, it can cause errors. AI is not accurate all the time. Therefore, a human scribe must go through the document to locate and revise errors. Accurate documentation ensures proper care delivery, reducing recovery time. With lower administrative workload, clinicians get more time for themselves, enjoying a healthy work-life balance.
5. What types of tasks can AI medical scribes automate for doctors?
Several tasks can be automated by AI scribes. For clinical documentation, it generates visit notes, SOAP notes, history of patient illness, review of systems, and medical history updates. Under workflow integration, it covers electronic health records data entry, template completion, and order entry. As for coding and billing support, AI medical scribes help with ICD-10/ CPT coding and billing compliance.
Also, they focus on automating administrative tasks, such as referral letters, patient summaries, and task management. Data synthesis, medication reconciliation, and evidence extraction are part of contextual intelligence, managed by AI. ScribeMedics’ hybrid model seamlessly aligns with your workflow and keeps you healthy overall.
6. Are AI medical scribes accurate and reliable enough for clinical use?
While the scribes powered by artificial intelligence help physicians to complete documentation faster, it is not always accurate. Misinterpretation of speech, hallucinations, incorrect details, omission errors, AI bias, data limitations, and zero understanding of clinical nuances are some key issues found in the documentation completed by AI medical scribes. These collectively make an impact on the care interventions, drifting the patient away from overall recovery.
However, if the clinician needs to go through each documentation, it will further burden them with additional tasks. Therefore, it may lead to physician burnout. With ScribeMedics, you can get an effective combination of artificial intelligence and human oversight. In their hybrid model, AI listens to the conversation and transforms it into clinical text. Then a human scribe goes through it and corrects the errors. Hence, the physicians get accurate documentation, and the patients get proper intervention.
