Tackling the Burnout Crisis in U.S. Health Care
The end of each day in hospital clinics is eerily silent; only broken by the uncoordinated clatter of keystrokes behind monitors lining the walls of the back office. Resident physicians sit silently behind desktops, furiously typing away to finish their notes, transfers, and orders for the day. Doctors now spend twice as much time behind a computer as they do with patients.
Similarly, nurses, medical assistants, and other health care staff have been increasingly relegated to desk jobs. During my twelve weeks working at a community health center, I saw a medical assistant spend every Monday sitting behind a desktop with a stack of papers listing each patient’s name and phone number. She spent the next eight hours calling each patient to confirm or reschedule their appointment for the next day, slowly crossing off each name as she moved down the list.
The end result is that the larger administrative burden placed on medical professionals is correlated to a rising incidence of burnout. Health care workers, who spend anywhere from four to fifteen years training for a career primarily to treat patients, hardly have the desire — or the energy — to spend the bulk of their time typing behind a screen. More than half of all physicians surveyed in a recent study said they suffered from burnout.
Clinicians — physicians, nurses, medical assistants — are most valuable when practicing at the top of their license, doing what they underwent years of training to do: treating patients.
As costing models move from the halls of business schools into the boardrooms of health care executives, health systems will realize that it’s well worth doing whatever it takes to give clinicians extra time with patients.
The bottleneck that often impedes such interactions [to establish rapport] is time. To give physicians more time to listen to their patients, health care organizations need to rethink the value of each hour of a physician’s workday. Giving doctors more time with patients and easing the burden of other tasks, such as recruiting medical scribes to document visits, automating discharge paperwork, off-loading lab orders, and streamlining care transitions, will move the needle toward better long-term patient care and away from the treadmill of efficiency.
Large hospitals can afford to hire scribes and administrative staff to offload many of the tasks that otherwise fall upon clinical staff. Scribes in particular have been shown to increase physician satisfaction and efficiency.
However, a hiring frenzy simply isn’t a sustainable solution — both for the smaller systems that can’t afford significant support staff to handle administrative duties and for overall costs accrued by the U.S. health care system at-large. More labor overhead leads to higher costs of care, which inevitably falls upon patients to cover through increasingly higher premiums and copays. Additionally, as more staff contribute to each patient’s heath care needs, coordination and communication turns into a game of telephone, more likely to go awry.
Building for Burnout
While technology, particularly electronic medical records, have largely been blamed for contributing to the burnout crisis in medicine, there is opportunity for technology to help ease the burden that today’s medical system places on clinicians.
We hear a lot of debate, often controversial, about artificial intelligence replacing radiologists, automating diagnoses based on prior health records, and chatbots that supposedly triage better than emergency rooms, but what if we instead imagined software and artificial intelligence as a tool to automate non-clinical operations — the parts of medicine that, while necessary, were never what clinicians were supposed to do.
In fact, the immediate value of ‘artificial intelligence’ in health care isn’t in improving diagnostics and clinical decision support, but rather in optimizing the same non-clinical workflow that contributes to burnout. It’s no coincidence that this area of the health care industry has had the fastest rate of job growth over past two decades, and entrepreneurs hoping to help untangle dysfunction in the U.S. health care system have taken notice.
This is why our team at Memora Health is excited to be automating tedious, repetitive operations tasks that nursing and front desk staff shouldn’t be doing manually. Just as computation has made other industries more productive, computers in health care should be workhorses, not bottlenecks.
By automating routine follow-up, including scheduling, prescriptions, patient queries, and basic health coaching into a simple SMS interface accessible to patients from all walks of life, we aim to give clinicians the freedom to practice at the top of their license and give health systems the power to scale their best follow-up and communication practices to every single patient that needs them.
Visit https://memorahealth.com and reach out at info@memorahealth.com to let us know how we can help your practice and patients. We’d love to hear from you!
Memora Health is building the operating system for care delivery that implements intelligent, streamlined workflows and revolutionizes the patient experience outside the care setting. We offer a smart end-to-end platform that unifies fragmented health care data to enable providers, payors, and life science companies to automate care delivery operations — from patient communication to documentation to reimbursement. We uniquely use artificial intelligence to digitize existing care delivery workflows, giving clinicians infrastructure that learns from every encounter they have. Memora supports a full suite of virtual care systems from automated patient intake and scheduling to remote monitoring and care pathways to billing and documentation. Memora is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Kevin Durant, Martin Ventures, and several healthcare strategic groups.
