CEOs: Physician Burnout a National Health Crisis
Burnout among physicians is becoming a national health crisis and healthcare leadership must step up to address the problem, 10 hospital CEOs emphasized in a recently published statement.
The consequences of physician burnout are significant, and threaten the U.S. healthcare system, including patient safety, quality of care, and healthcare costs, they wrote.
“The spike in reported burnout is directly attributable to loss of control over work, increased performance measurement (quality, cost, patient experience), the increasing complexity of medical care, the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), and profound inefficiencies in the practice environment, all of which have altered workflows and patient interactions,” the authors reported.1 “The result is that many previously well-adjusted and engaged physicians have been stressed to the point of burnout, prompting them to retire early, reduce the time they devote to clinical work, or leave the profession altogether.”
Some of the consensus items discussed at a recent summit held by the American Medical Association are summarized as follows:
- Use standardized measures that can be benchmarked to measure physician well-being.
- Ideally, physician measures should be included in a facility’s dashboard of commonly reviewed metrics.
- Analyze the cost to the facility of common physician burnout outcomes like high turnover, early retirement, and cutbacks in clinical practice.
- Assess whether physicians are facing an inappropriate burden of clerical work or other allocations of labor that could be driving burnout.
- Develop collaborative team care models that maximize the skills and training of physician members.
- Lobby regulators to reconsider regulations that are inefficient and redundant.
- Encourage and support the AMA and other national groups trying to align regulators with technology vendors in order to reduce the burden of electronic health records.
- Disseminate best practices and case studies from institutions that are successfully addressing physician burnout.
REFERENCE
- Noseworthy J, Madara J, Cosgrove D, et al. Physician Burnout Is A Public Health Crisis: A Message To Our Fellow Health Care CEOs. Health Affairs Blog. March 28, 2017: http://bit.ly/2nJWkGj.
Burnout among physicians is becoming a national health crisis and healthcare leadership must step up to address the problem, 10 hospital CEOs emphasized in a recently published statement.
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