The Whole Healthcare System is Burnt Out


We’ve all seen charts and graphs like the one above. Physician burnout has become a real problem. The EHR has largely become the scapegoat for the physician burnout, but I believe it’s much more complex than that. There are a lot of pressures on doctors that are causing burnout and even physician suicide (a topic which many don’t like to talk about).

Physician burnout is indeed an important topic and one that needs to be addressed. However, I recently saw someone tweeting about physician burnout and in response, someone suggested that we should be talking about Patient Burnout as well. The idea really resonated with me. Especially because I’d never heard anyone talk about patient burnout despite it being a real problem. To better understand the effort, I asked Erin Gilmer to host this week’s #HITsm chat on Patient Burnout. I think we’ll learn a lot about this topic during the chat.

This week I’m at the CHIME Fall Forum with a wide variety of healthcare CIOs. During one of the keynotes, the speaker mentioned physician burnout and it prompted the following tweet:


Indeed. Many healthcare CIOs are burnt out as well. They have so many regulations, so many intiatives, cybersecurity issues, and much much more that’s hitting them from every angle. it’s no wonder that they’re burnt out.

This all made me realize, the whole healthcare system is burnt out. Is there anyone in healthcare that isn’t a little burnt out? Some deal with it better than others, but there’s a lot of burnout all around in healthcare.

This tweet captured the issue of burnout nicely.


How then do we fix all this burnout? I wish I knew the answer. Acknowledging it is the first step, but that still leaves us a long way from a solution. Hopefully we can work towards it for everyone involved.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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