/Clinician-Burnout-Thesis

Exploratory analysis of Clinician EHR usage data to identify potential causes of burnout

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Clinician-Burnout-Thesis

Abstract
Healthcare provider “burnout” is a personal risk to both behavioral and physical health and seriously threatens the critical need for dramatically improved healthcare in the United States. Administrative demand on provider time is a significant contributor to burnout. Particularly to address this risk, important efforts have been made to implement Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) to facilitate and simplify routine healthcare provider tasks with the intent to reduce administrative time and therefore healthcare provider fatigue. Many studies have begun to quantify the effectiveness of EMRs in the typical physician’s workflow. However, few studies have tied physician measures of stress directly to workflow, particularly to EMR use variables measuring how much of the physician’s EMR interactions are outside normal work hours. Recent results suggest that although EMRs are designed to efficiently execute and automate routine tasks, they have not always achieved that objective. The long-term objective of this study is to develop a model of physician EMR use interaction that will longitudinally monitor key EMR use metrics measuring routine EMR tasks. Thereafter, this data will be used to create a model of the correlation of metrics associated with burnout risk as measured by the Single Question Burnout Survey (SQBS). We hypothesize that some EMR use metrics correlate to burnout risk (as measured by SQBS) and therefore remodeling the EMR workflows to change these metrics provides an intervention to reduce physician burnout risk. After a rigorous quality assessment of EMR use metrics gathered in Feb. 2020 of 1554 physicians, 21 use metric variables were found to be potentially important to planned future studies. Our preliminary results suggest that the collection of EMR use metric variables are a rich source of information regarding physician EMR use patterns and therefore may reflect risk factors associated with burnout. We anticipate that our future analysis will identify key elements in the EMR that reflect risk to fatigue and physician burnout.