How well-designed tech can help medical professionals avoid burnout

How should doctors and nurses spend their time? Ideally, talking with patients about their pain and progress, examining their illnesses and injuries, and planning their treatment. But, that’s a shrinking part of clinicians’ days. Luckily, it’s a reversible trend.

A study by the University of Wisconsin last year determined that primary care physicians spend more than half of their working hours on administration such as updating health records, ordering tests and inputting billing codes. Ironically, technology has become the problem — or, rather, poorly designed technology.

Take the electronic medical records systems that health care facilities have rushed to install in the last decade. In theory, they should make clinicians’ lives easier and patient care smoother, but in practice they force doctors and nurses to spend mind-numbing hours each day navigating a maze of screen menus, tabs, forms and buttons. Logging even routine procedures can take a dozen clicks. Such is the burden that “pajama time” has become an industry euphemism for the after-hours admin that’s now a routine part of clinicians’ home lives.

This contributes to extremely high rates of workplace stress among medical personnel – nearly two-thirds of doctors in the U.S. report feeling burned out or depressed. Long-term care facilities have particularly acute problems, with 70% turnover among nurses each year. To halt the trend of doctors and nurses spending a lot of time entering data, health care facilities need to adopt a multi-faceted approach to tech that tackles both the immediate symptoms and the underlying causes: