Administrative overload leads to increased burnout, decreased productivity, and increased turnover

The administrative burden on clinicians has increased exponentially in recent years. Clinicians frequently spend time on “non-value-added” elements of care that could be automated or safely accomplished by another care team member with less training. The amount of time clinicians spend on documentation as part of their workday is a time-sink that significantly contributes to burnout. “Too many bureaucratic tasks” is the top contributor to physician burnout: 61% physicians say it is the biggest contributor to their feelings of burnout. The same is true for nurses with one survey finding that administrative tasks, including documentation and paperwork, were the top contributor to nurse burnout.

Clinician burnout financially impacts hospitals and health systems in two ways:

1. Burnout reduces workforce productivity. Burned-out clinicians are more likely to miss work due to exhaustion or illness. Advisory Board estimates that the average cost of absenteeism is $1,685 per employee per year. In addition, burnout is associated with lower job productivity. One study estimates that each physician who experiences burnout results in an estimated $4,000 decrease in revenue per month due to decreased productivity.
2. Burnout drives turnover. Over time, burnout can also cost organizations due to increased staff turnover. Clinician turnover fueled by burnout is expensive to an organization, contributing to direct costs of recruitment when staff leave or reduce their clinical work hours. For an organization, the cost of physician burnout can range from $500,000 to more than $1 million per doctor. For nurses, each percent change in RN turnover will cost the average hospital $380,600 per year.

Leverage technology to alleviate clinician burnout and retain staff

There's potential for technology to alleviate clinician burnout by taking on administrative and repetitive tasks that take time away from caregiving—the reason why many clinicians chose healthcare as a profession. Technology solutions can reduce the data that clinicians are responsible for collecting at the point of care and entering into the medical record. Solutions include real-time ambient listening technologies that can transcribe the entirety of a patient-clinician interaction or asynchronous questionnaires that automatically populate the relevant fields in the patient's medical record. These solutions liberate clinicians to do the patient-facing work they want to do, rather than the administrative work that contributes to overload, burnout, and turnover.

Attracting and retaining clinicians will depend on an organization’s ability to support their staff against burnout—and part of that includes using technology to make their work easier. Clinicians will choose to work for organizations and in care settings where automation allows them to spend more time on patient care, rather than documentation. They won’t be willing to spend hours after work and over the weekend to complete documentation when automation technology can do that work for them.

Turnover and understaffing forces organizations to rely on short-term, expensive fixes to solve their labor needs

Unsafe staffing levels can cause stress among frontline staff when they feel like they’re providing care that does not meet their standards. These clinicians may choose to leave due to their work environment and perceptions of unsafe staffing levels. This burnout and turnover cycle leaves facilities understaffed and forced to rely on expensive, short-term fixes like contract labor or paying overtime rates to fill in the gaps. While contract labor can be an important short-term resource to meet immediate staffing needs, a chronic overreliance on premium labor is not financially sustainable. In the case of severe clinician shortages, provider organizations may be forced to cut back or even eliminate services, which can lead to decreased patient volume and lower revenue.

Leverage technology to augment staffing and monitoring support

To improve margins, hospitals need to control labor costs and decrease reliance on agency staff. There’s an often-missed opportunity for provider organizations to use technology to staff more efficiently. Leaders should leverage virtual technology to augment staffing and monitoring support, particularly in short-staffed units or those staffed heavily by novice clinicians. We've seen organizations do so in two ways:

1. Introducing an inpatient virtual RN role to provide expert support while shifting the bedside skill mix.
2. Creating a hub of expert and/or specialized clinicians to provide support to short-staffed sites of care.

The benefits of virtual care models include:

• Scaling clinical expertise: Virtual care models allow organizations to scale expert oversight throughout a hospital or health system by answering questions from bedside clinicians, streamlining documentation, and monitoring high-risk patients. The goal of this oversight is to support bedside clinicians with specialist expertise and free up clinician time to focus on direct patient care.
• Retaining expert clinicians: Virtual care models allow older clinicians to continue practicing, sharing their expertise, and lengthening their careers. The flexibility, reduced physical demands, and mentorship opportunities provided by virtual roles help create an environment that promotes the retention of expert clinicians in the workforce.
• Reducing labor costs: Virtual team-based staffing models assign tasks and responsibilities based on each team members’ expertise. By leveraging the competencies of each team member, organizations can streamline workflow and reduce labor costs by allowing team members to contribute within their scope of practice.

Low quality and patient satisfaction scores hurt financial performance

Clinician shortages can significantly lower care quality and ultimately hurt financial performance. In understaffed facilities, clinicians must see more patients, work longer hours, and take on additional responsibilities. This negatively affects overall quality measures, leading to penalties such as reimbursement reductions and public reporting of poor performance.

Understaffing also impacts patient satisfaction and revenue. Healthcare professional shortages cause longer wait times, treatment delays, and reduced communication with patients—all of which can negatively impact patient satisfaction, resulting in lower HCAHPS scores. Lower patient satisfaction scores can affect reimbursement from payers and can damage the hospital's reputation and community standing.

Leverage technology to increase clinician capacity to provide safe, high-quality care

Provider organizations must prioritize technology that can increase clinician capacity while simultaneously improving quality, safety, and patient experience.

One example of extending clinicians’ reach is remote patient monitoring (RPM). RPM—including wearables and portable diagnostic equipment—allows clinicians to remotely monitor patients' vital signs, symptoms, and other health-related information in real-time. This can free up clinician time and increase capacity, allowing them to see more patients and provide more comprehensive care.

Additionally, RPM can improve the quality and safety of care by allowing clinicians to detect changes in patient health status early, enabling timely intervention and reducing the risk of complications. Overall, RPM can increase clinician capacity, improve the quality and safety of care, and enhance the patient experience, making it a valuable tool for healthcare providers.

Another example is clinical decision-making technology. Clinical decision support (CDS) provides clinicians with evidence-based recommendations and alerts that support clinical decision-making at the point of care. Common CDS tools include alerts, order sets, care pathways, risk-assessment systems, and context-driven information displays. Effective CDS can help clinicians make more informed decisions and reduce the risk of medical errors, ultimately improving the quality and safety of care. CDS can also increase clinician capacity by streamlining workflows and reducing the time needed for patient data collection and analysis. This can free up more time for direct patient care and increase the number of patients that can be seen. Additionally, CDS can improve the patient experience by ensuring that clinicians have access to up-to-date patient information and can provide more personalized care.