Health Care Employee Burnout — Getting Ahead of the Curve

Burnout in health care, and building resilience, are key topics at this time. Turnover and safety rates are indicators of increased risk of employee burnout. New ways of working may also be contributing to the fatigue. Is your health care organization experiencing these signs? Axiom Consulting Partners’ Susanna Mlot, Partner, shares thoughts.

Burnout in health care and building resilience are key topics at this point in time. The old methods of assessing whether there’s a problem in that domain just aren’t working. Far too often, by the time an organization looks at turnover numbers, good people are out the door.  Similarly by the time safety incidents, medical errors, and patient falls are occurring regularly, caregiver burnout is already an issue. So turnover and safety rates are lagging indicators that may not be serving an organization well. Axiom Consulting is using data exhaust and advanced analytics to tap into existing data in the moment and with far less of a time gap to enable our clients to see areas that may have increased risk. It’s a new way of thinking about getting ahead of that curve.

There’s a lot of discussion right now too about new ways of working and the demands of technology on those who provide input into electronic medical records, for example, and how that creates an unsustainable workload for professionals. No one has a good answer for that because productivity is still the currency du jour to get reimbursed and contribute to margins at a level that will allow a health care organization to continue to provide services and do well. There are no magic bullets yet for that very important set of questions about burnout and resilience, but I think there’re better approaches forming to answering them using the data that already exists inside the organization.

Transcript edited for clarity.