Doctors report 15 hours of ‘pajama time’
About 93% of physicians feel burned out, but 83% say AI has the potential to reduce administrative burdens, according to athenahealth’s third Physician Sentiment Survey conducted by the Harris Poll.
To measure physicians’ feelings this year, atheneahealth added a new set of questions focused on artificial intelligence in its survey of 1,003 primary (750) and specialty (253) physicians nationwide.
WHY IT MATTERS
The electronic health care provider announced Wednesday that eight in 10 physicians who participated in athenahealth’s 2023 Physician Sentiment Survey between Oct. 23 and Nov. 8 are looking to AI to address the burnout they say has become the norm .
In the online survey, physicians cited excessive administrative workloads, reduced staffing levels, concerns about financial viability and rising patient expectations for communication as major challenges.
Spending a lot of time outside of their normal working hours could be one of the reasons why 56%, when asked about their current work situation, said they had considered leaving the field or staying in the field, but no longer seeing patients.
“Physicians are also overwhelmed by excessive communication with patients – 60% say they are expected to be available ‘all hours of the day, every day of the week’,” said Dr. Nele Jessel, chief physician at athenahealth, in a blog about the results and how technology can help with increasing burnout.
Atheneahealth said its doctors who use a fee-for-service model said the average time they work outside of normal business hours – what they call “pajama time” – is 15 hours per week. Although it was slightly lower among those using a value-based care payment model of 12 hours per week, physicians using both models reported the highest percentage of pajama time, at 16 hours per week.
Sixty-five percent of physicians surveyed indicated that EHRs (5% of total respondents identified as athenahealth customers, the company said) help them provide high-quality care. However, Jessel said that “they should experience more benefits and fewer additional complexities or burdens.”
The majority of physicians (63%) are currently so overloaded with information that it increases their stress levels, the company reports.
But almost all doctors – 94% – agree that getting the right clinical data at the right time is very important. Most (80%) also said they do not believe more clinical data is “always the answer” to achieving higher quality care.
The bottom line on the data front: Information overload is a growing cause of increasing burnout, cited by 30% of this year’s respondents, compared to 24% in the 2022 poll, a blind baseline survey conducted by January 4 to 26, 2022 among 743 people. practicing physicians.
However, the financial concerns are a little louder.
Atheneahealth said that in the past 12 months, half of physicians said they felt at least one day a week that they could not provide quality care based on volume and cost.
Four in ten physicians, or 38% of physicians, said they believe their organization or practice has solid financial positions, and 55% disagreed that they believe they have the resources and tools to deliver quality care to deliver.
Also, four in ten physicians say concerns will further complicate healthcare (42%), and that it is overhyped and disappointing (40%). Interestingly, atheneahealth said that the doctors surveyed who were pessimistic about the benefits of AI for healthcare also showed higher levels of burnout.
Those who said AI would address their challenges — twice as many doctors saw AI as part of the future than those who said it is part of the problem, the company said — also expressed more hope that health care is “moving in the right direction.” going on’ than colleagues, and felt less burned out.
THE BIG TREND
While information and technology may be seen by some physicians as causes of increasing physician burnout, IT is underutilized as a way to help physicians spend more time with their patients, said Julie Frey, director of product strategy at Wolters Kluwer Health, a developer of clinical decision support tools.
She said Healthcare IT news When organizations end up with tools that physicians are reluctant to use, it may be because they do not often engage multidisciplinary teams.
“We see this often with our healthcare system customers when the IT organization makes a decision based on criteria that don’t align with what their physicians want and need. They end up looking for a different solution,” Frey said.
Looking to AI to reduce physician burnout is something the government and healthcare providers like the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs are looking at.
The VA AI Technology Challenge to Address Physician Burnout – a sprint to document VA clinical encounters and integrate data challenge into community care – was announced shortly after the Biden administration’s AI executive order .
In the announcement, the VA said the use of trustworthy AI is critical to “delivering more care and more benefits to more veterans than ever before.”
ON THE RECORD
“One of the biggest concerns among physicians regarding AI is the potential loss of human touch (60%); that is an incredibly important signal that we need to pay attention to,” Jessel said in a statement.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.