Blog Posts

My personal blog where I discuss topics related to mental health in the workplace.

My Thoughts on the Massachusetts Burnout Paper

Multiple physician groups in Massachusetts recently published a paper called "A Crisis in Health Care: A Call to Action on Physician Burnout". I thought it was a very interesting read and I’ve included my main takeaways and thoughts on the paper below.

The key point of the paper, as you can probably tell from the title, is that physician burnout has reached critical levels. The paper cites a 2018 survey that found that "78% of surveyed physicians experience feelings of professional burnout at least sometimes" (over three out of four!). 

The paper also laid out three recommendations for the short, medium, and long term to handle this crisis:

  • Create more support for mental health treatment for physicians. The paper notes that there are a number of barriers that prevent physicians from being open with mental health concerns, including “probing questions” during licensure.

  • Improve EHRs with focus on usability. In particular, the authors recommend requiring EHR vendors to open up their systems to allow third party developers to customize workflows and interfaces.

  • Appoint Chief Wellness Officers to study and eliminate burnout across the organization. This executive level position would be a point person for creating a positive work experience for physicians.

Overall I am happy to see organizations continue to raise awareness and propose ways to reduce burnout. I do find the recommendations to be a bit too "hand-wavy" for my tastes. As someone that worked at an EHR vendor for several years I am skeptical that the paper’s recommendations will directly lead to the sort of usability improvements that the authors envision. The premise seems to be that software developers at EHR vendors are bad at usability … but if that’s the case, why should we expect software developers at a random start up to be better at usability?

I’m also not convinced that making a new executive position dedicated to wellness will have the intended effect. A potential unintended consequence is that other executives may decide that burnout is no longer their problem and defer the responsibility of handling burnout to this new position. I get that these are longer-term recommendations but I think there are a lot of blanks that need to be filled in for these to be viable. Still, I think this provides a good starting point for a discussion and I hope healthcare organizations look at this paper seriously.

What do you think? Email me

Kevin Joseph