Assessing the problem of provider burnout
The start of a new year is a great time for medical practices to take a closer look at some of the challenges that are common to organizations of every size and specialty. Topping that list is the persistent issue of provider burnout.
The statistical record has been clear: For most of the last 20 years, rates of physician burnout have been climbing, with some surveys showing half or more of all practitioners reporting one or more symptoms of burnout.
The causes are equally well-known, ranging from rising documentation and reporting requirements to increasing complex Electronic Health Record systems and staff shortages.
Dr. Christine Sinsky, vice president of professional satisfaction for the American Medical Association, said in an interview last August that physicians are feeling stressed not because of the work they do with patients — they love the art of caring for others — but because there are simply too many administrative tasks to handle.
“The stress, I believe, comes from spending our time doing the wrong work,” Sinsky said. “From things that get in the way of taking the very best care we can of patients. So one of the top reasons that physicians report stress is that there’s not enough support staff. So physicians end up, then, doing work that other team members could do if there were more support staff, and that means we can’t offer the same level of care to our patients or the same care to as many patients as we would if there was adequate staffing.”
How an AI medical scribe can help
But there is good news. Since 2021, according to AMA survey data, burnout rates have actually fallen — from 56% in 2001 to 52% in 2022, and 48% in 2023. The trend for 2024 — the full statistical picture is not yet available — suggests the rate will be even lower, at about 45%.
At least part of the reason for those declines is the growing use of medical scribes powered by artificial intelligence. Such scribes, which are increasingly accurate and cost effective, directly address the burden of documentation by allowing providers to focus on patients, not computers, during their visits.
By capturing clinical details and creating draft Progress Notes for the provider, these scribes give medical professionals a huge edge, saving hours of time each week and allowing them both to finish their documentation at the office and focus more of their energy on developing effective treatment plans for patients.
What is a multilingual AI scribe? How does it work?
It is also instructive that the best AI medical scribes on the market today are multilingual scribes, capable of documenting patient-provider visits in both English and other languages widely spoken by a practice’s patients.
Providers at Healing Hands Ministries (HHM) Health in Dallas, Texas, for example, have been using Sunoh.ai medical scribe to reduce documentation time and help bilingual providers, many of whose patients are native Spanish speakers.
Handling encounters plus hundreds of lab orders daily
“Sunoh.ai has truly been a game-changer,” said Dr. Scarlet Y. Herrarte Fornos, an infectious disease specialist at HHM, who uses Sunoh with hundreds of patients each month. “I run numerous labs and typically receive around 250-400 labs daily. With Sunoh.ai, I can review my lab inbox much faster, which facilitates better clinical decision-making. Sunoh.ai has also improved my patient interactions, which is especially important with young patients.”
Sunoh uses ambient listening technology and natural language processing to document care in English, Portuguese, and 20 dialects of Spanish. That represents a huge advantage for medical practices such as HHM Health that serve areas with large concentrations of patients for whom English is not their native language.
And Sunoh does much more than summarize the visit. It effectively captures the details of lab, imaging, procedure, medication orders, and follow-up visits. It streamlines clinical documentation by categorizing the summarized content into various sections of a Progress Note. That allows the provider to more efficiently review the note, making any modifications or edits that may be required before finalizing it as part of the patient’s record.