Burnout is Reaching Critical Levels in Healthcare. AI Can Help.

In 2023, the Centers for Disease Control drew attention to a healthcare problem affecting us all. Nearly half of healthcare workers reported workplace burnout. As a result, almost the same number of healthcare employees said that they intended to find a new job. 

This isn’t just a labor problem. It’s a problem that threatens to impact anyone who relies on the healthcare system. When organizations can’t maintain stable staffing, both their bottom lines and the patients they serve suffer. 

What’s one problem leading to burnout? Most healthcare employees choose their profession out of a desire to improve lives. But too often, caregivers find themselves spending more time on paperwork and repetitive, routine tasks than with patients. It’s the classic story of workplace burnout—when our jobs become overly repetitive, we lose our sense of purpose. 

And without this sense of purpose, we are all susceptible to burnout. To address burnout, we need to find new ways to reduce the burden of repetitive administrative work, facilitate better patient communication, and free up healthcare workers to focus on high-value patient interactions. 

Our healthcare workers are drowning in paperwork. Intelligent automation and AI can help. 

Burnout Affects Everyone

The American Psychological Association defines workplace burnout as an occupation-related syndrome that involves emotional exhaustion, psychological distance or negativity, and feelings of inefficacy. The bottom line? Burnout hurts the individual employee as well as the organization.

There’s a straightforward reason that half of healthcare workers report suffering from burnout. When paperwork overtakes patient care, the workers’ sense of purpose disappears, which leads to burnout. It’s a problem that’s not going away. Burnout rates have been climbing since 2018.

The problem is acute in healthcare. When workers suffer from burnout-related pressure and fatigue, patient satisfaction declines, as does operational efficiency and outcomes. 

Burnout also hurts the bottom line. Healthcare organizations are seeing annual turnover rates of up to 60% in contact centers, destabilizing operations and negatively affecting quality and efficiency. This amount of staffing churn makes it almost impossible for healthcare organizations to meet their missions.

This is why we must reimagine the way healthcare work is done.

Intelligent Automation Improves Care

If repetitive, routine tasks are a major source of burnout, then relieving healthcare workers from such tasks would go a long way in addressing the problem. This is where intelligent automation shines. 

Already, healthcare organizations are using automation tools to complete tasks both simple and complex. This includes routine patient communications such as appointment reminders and insurance verification. But intelligent automation can also handle more complex communications—requests for information, multilingual inquiries across any number of platforms, text, phone, and the web. 

The results benefit both patients and staff. Automating routine tasks frees up time for staff to do the purpose-driven work of caretaking. This is work only humans can do—work requiring expertise and empathy that drives purpose. 

Patients, too, benefit from faster and clearer answers to questions. They get the information they need exactly when they need it, improving satisfaction and operational performance. They also get a better-rested, more focused healthcare worker.

Better Communication, Less Burnout

Patient and staff satisfaction suffer without clear communication, which is often a major driver of workplace burnout. When communication breaks down between providers, patients, and systems, the unclear communication transforms into a cause of stress for everyone. 

Increasingly, healthcare organizations are turning to AI-powered platforms to enhance communication, connecting patients with providers and essential information. Important communications such as pre-visit reminders, follow-up information, and educational materials can be sent to patients exactly when they need them without burdening healthcare staff with these regular, routine tasks. 

This clear and timely communication breaks down the friction that can often build up between patients and providers. Using intelligent automation and AI-powered tools, organizations can map key communications to individual patients. This reimagining of healthcare helps ensure each patient receives vital information when they need it through the channel that is most convenient and easy for them to use. 

Automated communication also allows healthcare workers to focus on the most rewarding parts of their job, returning the sense of purpose that originally called them to their careers. They’re no longer wrapped up in repetitive scheduling or other communication tasks. Instead, they’re free to put their expertise and empathy to work helping patients. Rather than spending time leaving messages on a voicemail, they are comforting anxious patients, helping parents schedule urgent pediatric appointments, or walking patients through more complex billing questions that require the knowledge, expertise, and care that come with years of experience in healthcare. 

The ancient Greeks had a word for the right message delivered at the right time. Kairos. This means the perfect alignment of time and purpose. AI tools and intelligent automation help healthcare organizations align communications with the moments patients most need information. Automating communications also helps workers, relieving them of those routine, repetitive tasks that often contribute to burnout and allowing them to focus more on purpose-driven work.

Intelligent Automation Returns the Purpose to Work

Burnout isn’t just a staff issue—it affects us all. Widespread burnout leads to instability in staffing, which negatively affects both the quality of care and healthcare organizations’ bottom lines. AI-powered tools have been shown to alleviate healthcare burnout. Organizations should take advantage of these tools to address the growing problem.  

AI-powered tools can help healthcare organizations reduce the load of routine, repetitive tasks that contribute to burnout. These tools, along with intelligent automation, can also improve patient satisfaction, optimize organizational performance, and reduce staff turnover.

Healthcare workers choose their profession because they want to help improve the lives of their patients. These new tools can return the purpose to their work, giving staff the time and space to deliver the empathy and expertise that our healthcare systems need.