The COVID-19 pandemic placed stress on health systems and led to increased feelings of stress and burnout among the workforce.
Allen Hsiao, MD, the chief medical information officer and vice president of Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health stopped by the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast" to discuss ways to alleviate workforce burnout.
Editor's note: This is an excerpt. Listen to the full podcast here.
Question: How are you leveraging the technology that you do have in the right ways to kind of eliminate some of the stress and pressure that the workforce has? What do you think makes the most sense from your perspective?
Dr. Hsiao: That's a great question. I don't know if I have the right or perfect answer, but I think it's going to be a little bit of everything, where we do some of the tried and true technologies that we just haven't deployed that well or that broadly; we need to think about doing that more. There are things that I think we learned from the pandemic, certainly, and I think folks that are in the whole innovation group are very good at it. There's also the whole concept of feeling fast. Let's try different things, and it may not work. If it doesn't, that's okay; move on, but if it does work, then let's keep doing it and expand it.
I think that's helpful for two reasons. One, you don't really know how well something's going to work until you try it, and you could spend two years talking about it and that's not going to do anybody any good. It's not going to help the front-line clinicians. It's not going to help the patient. At the same time, you want lessons learned. I think the other thing, too, is I think our front-line clinicians, what they just want to know is that people care, that help is coming and even just knowing that people are trying.