CPOE, EHR utilization linked to professional burnout and dissatisfaction

The use of EHRs and computerized physician order entry is resulting in lower doctor satisfaction and larger amounts of professional burnout, in accordance to the outcomes of a national survey of practicing physicians.

Results of the research, issued in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, indicated that doctors’ satisfaction with their EHRs and CPOE was basically low due to the amount of time spent on clerical activities, and as an outcome, those physicians were at larger threat for professional burnout. Additionally, researchers discovered that utilization of CPOE was the characteristic of the electronic practice setting most strongly associated with the danger of burnout.

The research of 6,560 physicians, surveyed between the months of August and October of 2014, was led by the Mayo Clinic and taken in collaboration with investigators from the American Medical Association.

Professional burnout is a syndrome featured by exhaustion, cynicism and feelings of ineffectiveness, in accordance to Tait Shanafelt, MD, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic. “Physician burnout has been connected to reduced quality of care and medical mistakes as well as an increase in the likelihood physicians will cut back their work hours or leave the profession,” he claims.

Physicians across entire specialties were surveyed, offering data regarding to their utilization of EHR systems, CPOE and sufferer portals, with satisfaction varying instantly by specialty. Researchers discovered that family medicine physicians, otolaryngologists and neurologists were among the specialties with the reduced satisfaction amount with EHRs due to the increased clerical burden.

“We require searching ways to incorporate EHRs, sufferer portals and electronic order entry in a way that doesn’t increase clerical burden for physicians or decrease their efficiency,” claims Shanafelt, lead author of the study. “A variation of innovative approaches, like utilizing medical scribes, having nurses filter and respond to electronic messages from sufferers and having support staff handles queries using verbal communication instead of electronic messaging, have all been discovered to make better the efficiency,” he states.

 “The information from physician burnout surveys are merely getting worse year after year,” Jain on the day of Tuesday told the Healthcare Financial Management Association's Annual National Institute in the state of Las Vegas. “They feel like the network is aligning to make their work and their jobs complex.”

The Electronic Health Record Association refused to comment on the outcomes of the study and survey information.

This is not the 1^st time an AMA-associated survey has demonstrated these types of results. In the year of 2013, AMA and RAND Corp. conducted a research in which doctors recognized EHRs as the leading cause of emotional fatigue, professional dissatisfaction, depersonalization and lost enthusiasm. Particularly, doctors explained poor EHR usability that didn’t match clinical workflows, time-consuming data entry, interruption with face-to-face sufferer care, and overwhelming figure of electronic messages and alerts.