Leader to Leader: We Must Address Burnout Crisis

Physician burnout must be addressed as a public health crisis, says Toby Cosgrove, MD, President and CEO of Cleveland Clinic, along with ten other healthcare CEOs. The collective statement recently published in Health Affairs established a commitment to address the root causes of burnout, including “loss of control over work, increased performance measurement (quality, cost, patient experience), the increasing complexity of medical care, the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), and profound inefficiencies in the practice environment.”

The statement of commitment to action was a result of the September 2016 American Medical Association summit convened to address physician burnout as an issue of national importance. Dr. Cosgrove and his colleagues specifically committed to eleven actions:

1. Regularly measure the well-being of our physician workforce at our institutions using one of several standardized, benchmarked instruments.
2. Where possible, include measures of physician well-being in our institutional performance dashboards along with financial and other performance metrics.
3. Evaluate and track the institutional costs of physician turnover, early retirement, and reductions in clinical effort.
4. Emphasize the importance of leadership skill development for physicians and managers leading physicians throughout our organization.
5. Understand and address more fully the clerical burden and inappropriate allocation of work to physicians that is contributing to professional burnout.
6. Support collaborative, team-based models of care where physician expertise is maximally utilized for patient benefit, with tasks that do not require the unique training of a physician delegated to other skilled team members.
7. Encourage government/regulators to address the increasing regulatory burden that is driving inefficiency, redundancy, and waste in health care and to proactively monitor and address new unnecessary and/or redundant regulations.
8. Encourage and support the AMA and other national organizations to work with regulators and technology vendors to align technology and policy with advanced models of team-based care and to reduce the burden of the EHR on all users.
9. Encourage and support the AMA and other national organizations in developing further initiatives to make progress in this area by compiling and sharing best practices from institutions that have successfully begun to address burnout, profiling case studies of effective well-being programs, efficient and satisfying changes in task distribution, and outlining a set of principles for achieving the well-being of health professionals.
10. Continue to educate our fellow CEOs as well as other stakeholders in the health care ecosystem about the importance of reducing burnout and improving the well-being of physicians as well as other health care professionals.
11. Support and use organizational research at our centers to determine the most effective policies and interventions to improve professional well-being among our physicians and other health care professionals.