What is your sicktech and consolidation burnout impact factor (BIF)?

A group of former and current providers convened recently to discuss how digital transformation can be both contributing to and alleviating burnout.

The findings of this longitudinal cohort study indicate that telemedicine use is associated with greater time spent in the EHR; health systems and policymakers may need to alter productivity expectations and reimbursement policies.

One approach is digital minimalism. ??

UNC Health has been tapped to test-drive Epic's generative AI tools to help overworked clinicians respond to a deluge of patient messages.

Large language models like ChatGPT and Microsoft's Azure OpenAI?service have only been available to the public for a few months, but tech leaders at a handful of health systems are eager to be early adopters.

The survey found around 93 percent of respondents experienced burnout after working 15 hours over their normal hours.

The struggle with burnout is catching up to health care professionals who also contend with vast administrative workloads and staffing shortages. 83 percent, however, said AI could contend with some of those problems hovering over the health care industry, per the survey.

Still, most respondents, 60 percent, said their biggest concern with AI is the loss of human touch; 4 out of 10 physicians in the survey said the emerging technology will just contribute to complicating the field.

Information overload is the inevitable result of the modern organization’s always-on, more-is-better approach to communication. Unfortunately, it is also a driver of employees’ disengagement and poor decision making. While we are all, as employees and leaders, affected by this reality, the onus is on the company communicators themselves to craft a low-burden culture. It will require energy, expertise and coordination to architect and reinforce more human-centric communication practices.

Some claim AI has a direct impact on reducing burnout. Where is the evidence?

Patient portals sounded like another good idea at the time. But the burnout impact factor is high.

Startups offering the same kind of artificial intelligence behind the?viral chatbot ChatGPT ?are making inroads into hospitals and drug companies even as questions remain over the technology’s accuracy.

Healthcare startups such as Pittsburgh-based Abridge AI Inc., whose product helps doctors write notes after seeing their patients, and San Francisco-based Syntegra Inc., which uses generative AI to create realistic copies of patient data for research, say they have applied generative artificial intelligence for the safest and most accurate current uses in healthcare.?What will be the burnout impact factor?

Technofatigue, innovation fatigue and change fatigue are as ubiquitous as the Delta variant in unvaccinated people. It's the Goldilocks effect. Too little (bored)or too much stress (burnout) decreases productivity.

According to a recent poll, 20% of doctors plan to quit in 2 years.

It's time for sick care delivery organizations to demand a burnout impact statement from vendors as part of the vetting, piloting and implementation process . We should call a time out to deal with the systemic causes of sickcare professional burnout attributable to technology.

EHR use is a primary cause of physician burnout. Plus, efforts to achieve the quintuple aim sometimes work at cross purposes. For example, when it comes to communicating with patients using digital information and communications technologies, how do you balance productivity, payment and patient satisfaction at the cost of burnout?

John Elkington coined the “Triple Bottom Line” of People, Planet and Profit (also known as the 3Ps, TBL or 3BL). Up to today it is still gaining popularity and it has become part of everyday business language. All reason to be satisfied, one would think. However, despite its increasing popularity, Elkington has “recalled” the 3BL in a short article in?Harvard Business Review .?The reason, so we can extract from his comments, is the rhetorical misuse of the framework as an accounting and reporting tool, while profit still remains center stage.

There are many tools to measure the specific impact on people, planet and profits of a specific intervention.

The environmental impact statement (EIS) is a government document that outlines the impact of a proposed project on its surrounding environment. In the United States, these statements are mandated by federal law for certain projects. Environmental impact statements are meant to inform the work and decisions of policymakers and community leaders.

The Economic Impact Analysis (EIA) tool shows how your community health project's spending on staff, supplies, equipment, and other expenses benefits your community. The EIA Tool can be used by any community health organization wanting to understand how its activities affect the community.

The burnout impact statement (BIS) would likewise outline the impact of a proposed digital health project on sick care stakeholders, particularly end user sick care professionals.

Some useful parts of the BIS process would include:

1. A national BIS database
2. An evidence based registry of results
3. Including the BIS as a KPI during pilots
4. Mandatory input by end users during the evaluation and vetting stages by care innovation centers
5. A standardized pre and post pilot/implementation measurement tool
6. A BIS adverse events reporting system
7. A BIS risk management evaluation and mitigation strategy
8. A patient engagement and communications strategy to clarify expectations about when, how and who will respond to electronic requests for information
9. Reimbursement and payment for electronic communications and a new revenue model for responding to them. You pay more for same day delivery from Amazon don't you?
10. Creating third parties as data and information delivery managers or a data concierge service

Artificial intelligence is being deployed attempting to reduce the burnout impact factor of digital medicine and EMRs in four ways:

1. Creating content for patient education and treatment compliance
2. Complying with patient documentation requirements in the EMR
3. Communicating with other sick care stakeholders, like insurance companies, responding to prior authorization denials, patient emails, and patient care team members
4. Converting patient leads to "customers" using AI marketing techniques

However, AI might also be contributing to burnout by reducing click work and pajama time so doctors can see even more patients.

Three in 4 workers say AI reduced productivity and increased workloads. That's according to a recent survey from the freelancing platform UpWork . But what the reporting on this is not sharing is why.

AI is fueling burnout, not reducing it. To turn the tide, workers and entrepreneurs need to take a different approach to understand the unspoken causes and solutions.

Organizational consolidation might also be adding to burnout and career dissatisfaction given increasing loss of employee control.

With many physicians suffering from burnout, artificial intelligence could be a potential solution. Yet if health care payment models continue to push doctors to treat as many patients as possible, AI may inadvertently exacerbate the patient volume problem .

If you are not burned out, digital health will probably make you cooked but not fried. Sorry, but EMRs were only the start. The bad news of the BIS requirement, though, is we would have to hire even more MD/MBAs, who left practice because they were burned out by technology, to manage all of this.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entreprene urs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship