Burnout: Why Taking a Tailored, Data-Driven Approach Is Key to Reclaiming Your Healthcare Workforce

What’s Trending: Healthcare Leaders Must Look at Practice-Specific Burnout Assessments—Not Just Specialty-Specific Data—to Truly Address the Problem

Since the pandemic, physician and nurse burnout has reached alarming levels, creating a health crisis for both providers and patients alike. One of the best-known benchmark studies is Medscape’s?annual report on physician burnout . The 2023 report—released earlier this year—includes national averages across 29 specialties, and at least one-third of respondents in all specialties reported burnout.

While this report can be a helpful barometer for healthcare leaders to begin addressing burnout and making sustainable change, statistics broken out by specialty can be the wrong metric to pay attention to.

Here’s why: While burnout is ubiquitous, there’s wide variability from place to place.

For instance, Dan Shapiro, PhD , Director of Chartis Burnout Solutions, says he sees great variation of burnout levels in specific specialties, depending on the organization. “At one organization we assessed, burnout among anesthesiologists was 15%. At another organization, it was 60%,” Shapiro said. “This variation reveals an underlying truth that the local practice details at the ground level are what really matter.”

In other words, the specific specialty doesn’t have an inherent aspect that is driving burnout. It’s the circumstances around these healthcare professionals that lead to physicians and nurses experiencing emotional exhaustion, dissatisfaction, or frustration—and those circumstances are amenable to change.

Organizations need to leverage practice-specific burnout assessments to truly understand the issue among their own workforce.

Why It Matters:

Burnout demands urgent action. Without true solutions, healthcare organizations risk widespread implications for both their workforce and patients—including increased medical errors, lower patient satisfaction, and significant costs (ranging from $500,000 to more than $1 million per doctor ) when physicians leave or reduce their work hours.

Healthcare organizations that continue to look solely at specialty-specific data to pinpoint the problem can fail to grasp the full picture of how well employees’ needs are met and identify what changes will matter the most. Even with thoughtful efforts, they may find themselves implementing short-term, incomplete solutions that are unsustainable and ineffective.

Taking a systematic approach focused on practice-specific details has proven effective at addressing burnout and making organizations an employer of choice. “We have seen dramatic improvements at health systems, especially in nurse turnover. One organization went from a 22% turnover down to 11%,” says Shapiro. “And in a large group of academic physicians, turnover dropped from 16% to 10%. These represented savings in the millions of dollars in labor costs and improved wellbeing of these healthcare professionals.”

The good news is that burnout doesn’t need to cause healthcare professionals to leave the organization or the profession. There’s actionable work that practice-specific burnout assessments can identify, allowing leaders to reduce burnout, improve retention, and ultimately ensure better patient satisfaction and care.

What’s Next

While many healthcare organizations are grasping at tactics to help maintain their workforce, few are doing so with sustained success. For example, many health systems are conducting engagement surveys with their workforce. But these surveys have 2 significant problems: (1) overall, the insights aren’t actionable, and (2) the effort isn’t systematic. The result is that execution tends to fall to the lowest-level manager, who often isn’t able to make meaningful changes—if any at all.

Leaders can take these steps to systematically address burnout in a way that delivers lasting improvement:

1. Measure burnout at the organization. This is the starting point. Organizations need data specific to the organization and each specialty within their organization to identify the chief drivers of burnout they must address.
2. Understand the data. With survey data tailored to each specialty, leaders have the level of specificity needed to pinpoint practice details at the ground level that can be changed—and zero in on changes that will matter most.
3. Tailor interventions. Using practice-specific data, leaders can both plan targeted activities that will move the needle and tailor their interventions to their specialties, departments, and locations.
4. Measure progress. Pulse surveys, productivity and satisfaction key performance indicators, and other measures can gauge how well the organization is progressing toward its goals of reducing and preventing burnout. Doing so can also reinforce the organization’s commitment to creating a distinctly positive work environment, helping to achieve or maintain a market-leading role as employer of choice.

By taking a systematic, actionable approach to burnout, leaders can turn the experience of their workforce on its head. Instead of battling burnout, healthcare professionals at these organizations can love working in their profession—and love being in their workplace.

Explore more ways leaders can address burnout here .

ABOUT CHARTIS

Chartis is a comprehensive healthcare advisory firm dedicated to helping clients build a healthier world. We work across the healthcare continuum with more than 600 clients annually, including providers, payers, health services organizations, technology and retail companies, and investors. Through times of change, challenge, and opportunity, we advise the industry on how to navigate disruption, pursue growth, achieve financial sustainability, unleash technology, improve care models and operations, enhance clinical quality and safety, and advance health equity. The teams we convene bring deep industry expertise and industry-leading innovation, enabling clients to achieve transformational results and create positive societal impact.?Learn more .

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