Health care workers are experiencing unprecedented levels of burnout during the pandemic, leading many to quit or consider jobs that don’t involve patient care. To prevent more departures, their employers — desperate to retain critical employees amid staffing shortages — are ramping up tech investments to make work less stressful.
“We have an unprecedented amount of our clinical workforce that’s saying, man, I’m tired of this and I don’t know if I want to continue doing what I’ve been doing,” Albert Marinez, Intermountain Healthcare’s chief analytics officer, told STAT. Marinez spoke about burnout at the HIMSS conference last week in Orlando, Fla., where employee retention was a recurring theme.
To address low morale and burnout, he said, Intermountain has been using data analytics technology to flag what’s bothering employees the most, whether it’s pay or work schedules. Sometimes that means combing the public online forums they post on, or it might mean inviting clinicians to suggest parts of their jobs that could be automated and building or buying that tech.
This article is exclusive to STAT+ subscribers
Unlock this article — and get additional analysis of the technologies disrupting health care — by subscribing to STAT+.
Already have an account? Log in
About the Author Reprints
To submit a correction request, please visit our Contact Us page.
