How health systems can help doctors reclaim joy, purpose and balance

In the relentless pursuit of excellence and patient well-being, physicians remain the committed backbone of modern health care. Yet behind the white coats and stethoscopes lies a growing crisis that demands immediate and sustained action: physician burnout.

Physician burnout was a mounting issue in the years leading up to the COVID-19 public health emergency. This time sharply intensified the underlying pressures—excessive workloads, emotional fatigue and systemic inefficiencies—that were already taking a toll. 

But health systems and organizations are answering calls for greater sustainability and well-being to be incorporated into system management. 

R. John Sawyer, PhD, a neuropsychologist who works in the office of well-being at Ochsner Health led a three-part discussion with the AMA about what his system is doing to address burnout. Ochsner Health is a member of the AMA Health System Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.

R. John Sawyer, PhD

From refining EHR use to assistance with overabundant digital messages and clarifying which feedback should contribute to doctors’ metrics, Sawyer shows methods that systems can meaningfully adapt to face this pressing problem. 

1. Keep some things “out of sight, out of mind”

   1. Reducing physician burnout involves many strategies, but the most common solution has been to adopt new technology that improves efficiency and eases doctors’ administrative burdens. Examples include the use of ambient AI tech that can save doctors up to an hour a day.
   2. Yet even as physicians have quickly gained greater access to technology that saves time and effort, burnout rates have not dropped as quickly as hoped, according to Sawyer.
   3. “The minutes saved with new technology tools are not enough to counterbalance the avalanche of new tasks constantly added to a doctor’s day. Put simply, helping doctors click faster won’t completely dig us out of the burnout crisis,” Sawyer said in an interview. “Addressing this challenge requires us to clearly face two realities in this current era of medical practice.”
   4. Those realities, explained Sawyer, are that there is a looming shortage of physicians unlikely to abate anytime soon; and that the younger generation of physicians are vocal about needing improved work-life balance. Read on for more insights from Sawyer on how to improve these aspects of practice, such as sharing the EHR burden and patient messages with support teams. 

2. Say goodbye to “metric madness”

   1. As high achievers, physicians have been monitoring their performance for as long as they can remember. And if you give physicians a metric, they are likely to pay close attention and feel responsible for it.
   2. But too often in the contemporary health care landscape, piling metric upon metric becomes the default solution for driving performance in health systems.
   3. “Metrics are important. It’s like with school—we need grades or we’re probably not going to study,” Sawyer said in an interview with the AMA. Similarly, performance metrics in health care are important.
   4. “You’ve got to have a target if you’re going to know what to go for,” Sawyer said. At the same time, he and his colleagues came to see that health care has developed “a culture of way too many metrics—that all of a sudden, physicians feel accountable for metrics they can’t influence.”
   5. This unwelcome trend has led to physicians being held responsible for too many metrics that they cannot—and should not be expected to—reasonably manage, according to Sawyer.
   6. If doctors are given a metric to gauge their performance, “they’re going to want to do well on it,” Sawyer noted. “And if they don’t, it’s going to be distressing.”
   7. This raises the question: Which metrics are really important for physicians and which are not worth physicians’ valuable attention, time and effort? Learn more about how Ochsner Health is working to refine their metrics tracking to more accurately reflect results of their system’s patient care efforts. 

3. Build sustainable schedules that reflect total time working

   1. Physician schedules often fail to block off the time required to complete nonpatient-facing tasks such as clinical documentation, patient messages and chart review. If this hidden time were accounted for, doctors could show that they have vastly reduced availability for seeing patients, given the amount of time that is required to complete these nonclinical tasks.
   2. “Rather than reduce patients’ access to a doctor by blocking their schedules, it makes much more sense to delegate various tasks,” said Sawyer. “This helps the physicians keep a sustainable schedule and optimizes the function of each care team member.”
   3. He believes this is important to maintain a healthy work-life balance for physicians.
   4. “One of the top things we see in healthy clinician experience is that they have a schedule that’s flexible and adaptable to life—but that has to be balanced because there are always patients who need to be seen,” he said. “So how do we factor in all the non-face-to-face clinical work as time?”
   5. Regarding how much time really is spent on documentation tasks, Sawyer suggests that “if it were really blocked out for the physician, that would be a very expensive amount of time each week.”
   6. That then raises the question: Who else should be doing that documentation or administrative task? Read on to learn more about how Ochsner Health is working to find actionable answers to these questions to lessen burnout in meaningful and continuously improving ways.

As the leader in physician well-being, the AMA is reducing physician burnout by removing administrative burdens and providing real-world solutions to help doctors rediscover the Joy in Medicine®.

Download the 2024 AMA Joy in Medicine magazine (log into your AMA account to view) to see whether your organization is part of the prestigious group of 130 organizations across 35 states that are currently recognized for their dedication to physician well-being.

AMA STEPS Forward® open-access toolkits offer innovative strategies that allow physicians and their staff to thrive in the new health care environment. These resources can help you prevent burnout, create the organizational foundation for joy in medicine and improve practice efficiency. 

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