By Dr. Christopher Maiona

The problem of physician burnout is all over the news and has attained “crisis” proportions. According to the American Medical Association, roughly 50 percent of physicians have or are experiencing it.

Even more startling, 30 percent of practicing physicians say they wouldn’t choose a career in medicine if they could start over again. The mindset of future physicians isn’t much better. One in four final-year residents already regret going into medicine, despite being such a hot commodity in today’s job market.

Recognizing a problem is the first step toward solving it, and thankfully, hospital executives have noticed this one. Many are taking a multi-pronged approach to improve their physicians’ experience, looking to tactics like improved communications, physician support services, and community-based efforts to reconnect physicians with their love of medicine – not only as an altruistic exercise, but for the sake of their business performance, the quality of patient care, and the overall vitality of the American healthcare system.

One critical component for improving the physician experience is more physician-friendly information technology (IT). As a practicing physician myself, I know how IT can impact care delivery, and currently it’s not for the better. On any given day, for every hour a physician spends directly interacting with a patient, they spend two hours on administrative tasks and electronic health record (EHR) data entry. Outside of healthcare, it’s unheard of for an industry to add technology and simultaneously reduce the productivity of its most precious human resource. Yet in healthcare we’ve managed to accomplish just that. Chained to their computers, physicians have limited time to do what they’ve actually trained to do – care for patients.

From clinical burden to clinical asset
Despite the best of intentions by technology developers, healthcare IT currently is a burden to physicians, who daily confront countless alerts, notifications, and displays of irrelevant information that hamper their ability to do their jobs efficiently. As a result, IT is a primary contributor to today’s physician burnout epidemic.

Rather than causing unwanted headaches, IT should be a valuable resource to help physicians be a little sharper and more efficient, and allow them to obtain a better understanding of patients as a whole. For example, as a hospitalist for over 20 years, the first thing I do in the morning is pre-round, which can easily take up to an hour. I’d welcome a computer system that streamlines pre-rounding by highlighting critical changes that occurred overnight and that helps me prioritize tasks for the day in an intelligent manner, and that is consistent with how I practice. I’d get on the floor sooner, and by the patient’s bedside earlier.


Granted, what I find most helpful as a hospitalist isn’t right for every provider. Currently, when physicians log into an EHR, they see the same view of patient information regardless of their specialty, the disease state they’re dealing with, or whether they’re caring for a new or existing patient. Healthcare IT should be putting the most relevant, situation-specific information on the very first screen that each physician sees.

In the mind of a physician, EHR usability refers to accessing and acting on patient information with ease, almost instinctively. Having patient data presented in a manner that is consistent with each individual physician's thought process and workflow, and that allows him or her to act on that information on the fly, is the first key to beginning the transformation of physician-facing IT from clinical burden to critical asset.

The road ahead
As problematic as they have been until now, I believe EHRs, appropriately optimized, can improve care delivery and the day-to-day lives of physicians. According to KLAS Research, “Organizations that succeed have cultures that want to ensure they’re doing what they can to optimize EHR use.” However, we must keep in mind that “well optimized EHRs are not one-size-fits-all.”

In an ideal world, physicians would have one foundational system that they interact with, and all other applications would simply coexist within that environment. An intuitive design with workflow-centric applications will get physicians out from behind their monitors, and back to patients’ bedsides. Emerging advances in artificial intelligence, data visualization and modern interface design also present opportunities to dramatically improve the usability and clinical value of IT.

2019 is the year that healthcare as an industry needs to focus on putting physicians first. If reducing physician burnout is a primary goal for healthcare organizations, they must start by giving providers a seat at the table and a voice in deciding what will make them, and the care they deliver, better. Physicians deserve to be treated the same way that they treat their patients: with support and respect. From an IT perspective, support and respect takes the form of customized, workflow-specific systems that deliver the timely, relevant information providers need, instead of too much irrelevant data that they don’t.

Technology should be an extension of the physician – a tool that makes these highly skilled and knowledgeable professionals better at their jobs. When the computer is as indispensable to patient care (and as easy to use) as the stethoscope, we will have brought healthcare into the 21st century, and taken a giant step toward eliminating a major problem contributing to the physician burnout crisis.

About the author: Dr. Christopher Maiona is the chief medical officer at PatientKeeper Inc., a provider of EHR optimization software solutions.