Total Experience Strategies for Improving Burnout and Patient Care

Addressing clinician burnout while elevating patient care, satisfaction, and engagement is a vital healthcare challenge that demands a comprehensive, total experience (TX) strategy for lasting results. The buzz around patient engagement is growing and we often hear what healthcare organizations are doing to improve satisfaction among their consumers. While patient portals, mobile apps, and various multi-channel experiences take the spotlight, evaluating and implementing tech lands on digital and IT teams, not clinical users. Yet, the focus is on the return on investment (ROI), without deeper discussions on the ability to improve health outcomes.

Health systems are spending substantial time mapping detailed patient journeys and identifying pain points. Though what frequently goes unnoticed are the challenges arising from clinicians not adopting and engaging with digital technologies. Patients are voicing a desire for more time spent with their doctor, ensuring their doctor truly knows and is invested in them. Conversely, physicians are expressing they want to spend more quality time with their patients, less time charting, and less time on administrative activities.

Given these goals, why are we continuing to build digital teams and processes that don’t include clinicians front and center?

Instead, current approaches involve defining the needs and presenting the designed solution to a physician committee with a full agenda. Or, we add a doctor, or two, to our digital governance team and call it good enough. We take highly trained and skilled individuals, then exclude them from any decision making and innovation.

We spend considerable time discussing provider technology adoption strategies and how to encourage care teams to embrace technology, rather than empowerment of their voice in the decisions. Meanwhile, we’re facing critical physician shortages and record levels of burnout. Our immediate problem isn’t just getting physicians to adopt tech, it’s stopping the factors contributing to the burnout and exclusion.

So, if we’re willing to trust these same doctors with our health and lives, why aren’t we willing to trust that they can play a larger role in the technology and digital engagement that is needed to be successful?

How Did We Get Here?

Over a decade after the signing of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, aimed to propel EHR adoption in the U.S., EHR usage is widespread domestically and globally. However, due to poorly designed and fragmented workflows, physicians are now spending more time at their computers than with patients.

From 2021 to 2022, over 145,000 healthcare providers left the workforce due to burnout, which was exacerbated by extended hours, stress, and inadequate compensation. These challenges, magnified by the pandemic, have long troubled the healthcare industry. Physician burnout surged from 40% in 2013 to 51% in 2017 and physicians are now working 16 extra hours a week compared to the average U.S. employee.

Electronic health records (EHRs) aim to streamline administrative work, yet providers are still seeking improvement in reducing time spent on charting, documentation, and dealing with reports – each greatly contributing to provider burnout.

Further contributing to burnout, clinicians are facing excessive alerts and data entry, information overload, slow response times, and EHR navigation difficulties, among others. During a 10-hour shift, clinicians are enduring up to 4,000 mouse clicks and 12% of their day reviewing patient charts. EHRs’ user experience, assessed using the System Usability Scale, place it in the bottom 9% of scores across industries in the “unacceptable, Grade F” category.

These same platforms pose a challenge in accessing information care teams – navigating orders, labs, data sets, diagnoses, medications, and media – due to fragmented workflows and processes. Currently, physicians handle 2,500 new data points daily and receive around 300 additional messages, on top of patient communications via online portals. Inpatient teams exchange texts ever 2.2 to 4.6 minutes, coupled with constant patient alerts. The cognitive load required to process this information is exacerbating burnout among clinicians.

Clinicians want technology and problem-solving solutions. They’re wanting to have a voice in saying what is needed. At the mercy of these implemented Electronic Medical Records, clinicians often identify crucial features, capabilities, and workflows only to learn they are part of a future roadmap that’s months, if not years, away.

What is Total Experience?

Key to addressing these challenges, and transcending the “clinician adoption” hurdle, is championing TX rather than a limited focus on patient experience. Using a TX framework allows healthcare organizations to improve overall consumer, patient, and clinician experiences. TX is a strategy that combines customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), user experience (UX), and multi-experience (MX) to examine and innovate superior experiences for all stakeholders while considering the interconnected nature of actions.

• Customer Experience (CX): The overall perception and interaction a customer has with an organization throughout their journey. It involves understanding several facets of customers’ desires, expectations, sentiments, and prior experiences.
• Employee Experience (EX): The sum of an employee’s and clinician’s interactions, satisfaction, and productivity with an organization, spanning work environment, culture, and tools. This enhances employee satisfaction (notably among clinicians), retention, skill level, and productivity.
• User Experience (UX): The experience of a person engaging with a product or service, including usability, accessibility, and satisfaction with all interactions. It merges business goals, user requirements, and design best practices to optimize digital offerings.
• Multi-experience (MX): The cohesive user experience across touchpoints ensuring consistency and usability. Engagement across digital platforms and channels, including mobile apps, SMS, and wearables that can also employ a mix of interfaces, such as voice and touch, to enhance interactions.

Employing a TX strategy helps to address typically siloed approaches to CX, UX, and MX as well as lack of attention on EX as contributing to the overall patient experience. Additionally, separating strategies for each of these experience components leads to technology-related burnout due to replication within reimagined care delivery models that incorporate additional virtual tools.

Incorporating a Total Experience Strategy for Improving Burnout and Patient Care

Incorporating TX into the daily efforts of improving care through technology requires healthcare provider organizations to embrace the following key strategies:

1. Challenge Teams with a Total Experience Approach

Encourage your teams, including IT, administrators, and operations staff, to adopt a TX approach when designing and implementing digital health solutions. When was the last time they observed and understood the workflows, interactions, and pain points of doctors, advanced practitioners, nurses, therapists, and social workers by rounding alongside them? Foster their ability to develop fluency in one another’s languages and ways of working.

2. Include Clinicians in Innovation

Ensure that clinicians – the actual users – actively participate in innovation and decision-making groups. Obtaining buy-in with clinicians up front is key, along with upskilling them in human-centered design methods. Pairing their expertise with that of consumer experience designers allows for scaling of ideas where you now have commitment. Identify how to recognize and reward clinicians’ effort, time, and expertise just as mindfully as you value and compensate it in patient-care settings.

3. Simplify Technology Adoption

Make trying and adopting new technologies easier. While many CIOs want to consolidate vendors and point solutions outside of EHRs and optimize existing technology, it’s crucial to also facilitate an easier evaluation and pioneering use of new digital health tools. This includes standardizing processes for security, compliance, and legal reviews to allow smaller, innovative companies into the digital ecosystem.

4. Evolve Integration Thinking

Shift how we think about integrations, much like how Plaid transformed how application program interfaces (PIs) and other tools connect financial services and applications with consumers’ banking information securely. Explore similar opportunities in healthcare to support various health-related activities. This integration can ensure standardized and secure access to health data, simplifying the development and operation of new and existing applications.

Meet the Author

Sarah Brandt | SVP, Delivery
Sarah Brandt is a digital transformation leader with over 15 years of experience partnering with organizations to rethink their approaches to consumer and employee experiences. She has partnered with integrated health systems, data analytics and digital technology providers, and clients to structure and execute strategic initiatives that drive measurable improvement in health, well-being, and business outcomes. She is passionate about helping cross-functional teams standardize and scale operations using data, technology, human capital, automation, and process re-engineering. Learn more about Sarah on LinkedIn.