OH Working to Ease Physician Burnout

By Scott Hagerman, Messenger-Inquirer

Healthcare systems across the country more and more are recognizing burnout among physicians as a need that must be addressed.

Owensboro Health is not immune from the concern, and that's why it has begun a major effort to improve physician well-being among its staff.

"As time has gone on, there is as much time spent on documentation and the administrative work compared to caring for the patients," said Dr. Bridget Burshears, Owensboro Health's chief medical information officer. "So we're really looking for opportunities to be able to get the provider back to caring for the patients."

Burshears said the demands on physicians have grown exponentially in recent years outside of direct patient care.

"Juggling and working with insurance providers, patients who are more ill over the course of the years when you add all of that up, it creates a heavy burden on the provider," Burshears said. "So we, as an organization, really want to find a way to help relieve some of that burnout and the burden on providers and make sure that our providers that provide care to our community are engaged and happy working with us and in an environment that allows for them to be excellent patient care providers and to be able to bring more providers to our area that we know the community needs."

Burshears said there aren't one or two physician specialties that stand out as the most likely to see burnout. She said it's usually seen in physicians who have built practices over years.

"It kind of varies across specialties, and I don't have a great feel for it being one specialty," she said. "I think it depends on age, because you have more patients, more responsibilities at that point, and it gets to be challenging."

Owensboro Health conducts a staff survey every two years that Burshears said has been important to meeting the needs of its physicians.

"We want to hear what their concerns are and how we can work with them to make their lives better," she said.

Mack Howell, Owensboro Health Medical Group's chief operating officer, said a root issue in physician burnout is a national shortage of physicians.

"We are trying to figure out care models and leveraging nurse practitioners to be engaged and things to kind of assist with a lot of patient care," Howell said. "But there's not a surplus of any physician specialty anywhere in the country. And in a small community such as Owensboro, it's a little bit more challenging, because a lot of the physicians end up flocking to the major metropolitan areas because there is less call burden, and a lot of those get affiliated with medical centers and larger groups.

"I think that's part of it, and we have age population among our physician group, different generations, and some of them don't have the same thoughts and expectations about what work should be like. What we try to focus on at the medical group, as kind of the leadership team, is what are those things we can do to help take the administrative burden from our physicians so they can just take care of patients."

Howell said no physician enters the field to do the administrative work, such as dictating notes or dealing with insurance companies.

"They just want to come take care of patients and not worry about the administrative burden," Howell said. "So we always want to try to keep a pulse on how it's going as a physician provider and look for ways we can make improvements through feedback and make it better, because it's a highly competitive market from a recruitment standpoint."

"So we want to have the right culture, we want to have the right infrastructure, so we welcome providers here and hopefully keep them for a while."

Howell said Owensboro Health has been very successful at physician retention, which also helps prevent burnout.

"We've done a pretty good job of that with our retention rate with our physicians; it's been running about 87% a year," Howell said. "So we don't have a ton of folks that leave. But there's such a demand."

Howell said Owensboro Health has excelled at making sure physicians are comfortable with the area from their first visit, which not only helps recruitment but retention.

"We try to solve whatever worries they may have, whatever needs they may have, really kind of in advance of when they come here," he said.