Burnout among healthcare professionals has remained at record levels since the COVID-19 pandemic. A study by the Mayo Clinic found that 3 out of 5 physicians surveyed reported experiencing one signal of burnout. This phenomenon is not limited to physicians. A study by Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that 50% of all workers across the healthcare industry, including in non-clinical roles, were experiencing burn out. The Department of Health and Human Services expects the physician shortage to exceed 100,000 in the next decade.
But what is burnout? There’s a difference between having a bad day or feeling a work stress, and experiencing major burnout. Burnout is best described as “a complete state of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion.” The symptoms include…
- Emotional symptoms including being disengaged with enjoyable activities on and off the job, a sense of hopelessness, a sense of failure, and anxiety
- Physical symptoms including headaches, fatique, frequent illness, and changes in sleep or appetite
- Changes in productivity and behavior at work, such social and professional withdrawal, decreased output, procrastination and more.
Core reasons for burnout in healthcare include time pressures, non-clinical job responsibilities outside of patient care, and an increased workload. Administrative work has reached unsustainable levels, especially without the right technology and tools in use to support staff.
Four ways to actually reduce burnout for providers and administrators with EliseAI
- Automate patient scheduling and coordination
EliseAI can respond to all emails, chats, texts, and the phone, so your staff will spend less time responding to inquiries and manually scheduling appointments. An AI Assistant can also integrate with your scheduling software to only book appointments around provider schedules, with no double-booking or overbooking and with respect to all black out times/dates. With your front desk staff focused on faster check-in, your patients will experience less time in the waiting room. The attention of your team won’t be divided, enabling them to focus on one task at a time. Plus providers with an automated schedule will know more about their day-to-day and get to spend more time with patients, rather than rushing from appointment to appointment.
- Integrate more technology into your EHR
Electronic Health Record end users reported spending an average of half of their day updating patient records. With AI that integrates into all existing medical systems, and quickly, you can take a good portion of record-keeping off your team’s task list. EliseAI auto-updates patient records after every online interaction and tracks their prescriptions and billing, enabling teams to use AI as a tool to speed up data collection and entry. With an average of 2-3 hours back in their day, they can pursue professional development, take regular meal breaks, engage in team building, or seek out resources to improve their own health, mentally and physically. All these things are proven tactics to treating burnout.
- Streamline billing and collections
An AI Assistant not only has the ability to code care for insurance, but can also communicate billing and payments to patients over text, email, or their preferred communication channel. Non-clinical teams no longer have to take on the difficult emotional labor of reminding patients to pay, but instead can track payments on their systems to report more accurately on the financial state of their center.
- Reduce phone calls to your office with AI that always picks up
Trying to check in a patient while answering the phone creates a frustrating experience both for office admin, but also for the patients themselves. Centers can maintain more control of their phone lines by launching an AI that can actually speak to patients on the line. A deeply conversational AI Assistant can answer questions, have a back and forth discussion about someone’s health and schedule their appointment seamlessly, with some callers unable to detect that they’re speaking to AI at all.
Not only does your team have to do less multitasking, but patients spend less time on hold and can access care faster.
Health systems are stuck between a rock and a hard place - physician burnout and financial stress are both squeezing margins and impairing operations. Given that much of the administrative work in healthcare is repetitive, from appointment scheduling to clinical notes, artificial intelligence should play a prime role in alleviating these pressures by offloading administrative work from clinical workers across the spectrum.
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