High levels of burnout, job dissatisfaction and turnover persist in healthcare. At all levels, healthcare leaders are under increased pressure to address the root causes of burnout and improve employee engagement to keep their teams whole.
Becker's Hospital Review recently spoke with two experts from Huron Consulting Group — Colleen McCrory, senior director and healthcare coach, and Nic Vostal, business development manager — about the state of clinician burnout and the promise of innovative rounding solutions.
The state of clinician burnout + proactive rounding
According to an American Medical Association report, published in June 2023, the physician burnout rate reached 53 percent in 2022. While burnout in 2022 was not as high as in 2021, physicians' job satisfaction worsened and physicians reported high levels of stress, with 56 percent feeling stressed by factors including workload and administrative tasks. Due to burnout and dissatisfaction, about 40 percent of physicians said they were definitely, likely or moderately likely to leave their positions in the next two years.
Employee engagement is a costly problem for healthcare organizations. "Disengaged employees are often a source of absenteeism, lower productivity and lower profitability," Mr. Vostal said. "In our experience, disengagement can equate to losses of up to 34 percent of an employee's annual salary."
Rounding can help prevent against — and reverse — disengagement, but it must be done proactively with a hands-on approach. Effective rounding practices can increase trust and psychological safety for employees. This boosts an organization's ability to retain staff.
"Sometimes in periods of chaos, there is a reluctance to round," Ms. McCrory said. "Yet, I think moments of high stress are actually the best time to round. That's when leadership teams get radical candor and valuable feedback from employees that's actionable."
To round effectively with employees, leadership teams must be consistent and set expectations for how often they will round. In addition, the organization must identify a desired set of outcomes and then create standardized questions based on that. This makes it easier to track trends and themes in the feedback.
Good rounding means taking the feedback you receive and acting on the voice of the employee. "The discipline of a consistent rounding practice alone isn't enough," Ms. McCrory said. "You also need to follow up and take action based on what you hear."
Technology enables teams to capture and act on information gathered during patient rounding
The same tenets for employee rounding also apply to patient rounding. Patient rounding often requires burdensome documentation. Manual processes are one of the largest barriers to effective patient rounding in many organizations. Scarce resources are wasted on data collection and collation. Technology solutions accelerate insights, so leadership teams can act more rapidly.
"We recently worked with an organization to revamp its rounding practices," Mr. Vostal said. "The team added up all the time required for manual processes and discovered that one unit spent nearly 60 hours a week adding medical record numbers to paper, scanning and emailing completed papers and then manually re-entering data. Once the organization deployed Huron Intelligence, employees stopped doing data entry and started using actionable reports to glean true insights about how to improve organizational processes."
When gathering data on patient rounds, it's critically important to "measure what matters." That means only collecting information that is actionable. Huron Insights reports enable leaders to operationalize information gathered on rounds.
"One of the biggest benefits of using technology for rounding is the proactive measures," Mr. Vostal said. "If something needs to be fixed, every effort should be made to do that in the moment. If that's not possible, Huron Intelligence® Rounding makes it possible to notify the right people through issue management. Users can easily assign issues to the right department and person and then track them to successful outcomes."
The link between high employee engagement and positive patient experiences
When it comes to rounding, healthcare organizations can use myriad metrics to evaluate return on investment and the success of their technology implementation. On the employee side, key measures include employee engagement and voluntary turnover. On the patient side, measures related to the patient experience and service recovery issue resolution can be useful.
"Some organizations may decide to measure employee engagement at the micro level, focusing on things like process improvement, recognition or trust in a leader that creates an environment of psychological safety," Ms. McCrory said.
By using Huron Intelligence® Rounding to capture the experiences of employees and patients, organizations often see double-digit percentile point increases in employee engagement and HCAHPS percentile rankings. These two metrics are typically correlated: as employee engagement increases, so does patient satisfaction.
Finding the right rounding tool for your organization: Tips and best practices
Improving the workplace with technology is something both healthcare leaders and employees want. Huron's healthcare talent research found that digital, technology and analytics (DTA) continues to be one of the five most important factors for employees. When it comes to rounding, technology solutions help organizations create better staffing models and identify process improvement opportunities at scale.
"We've seen early adopters of Huron Intelligence® Rounding digital technology experience accelerated results," Ms. McCrory said. “Organizations who leverage the data outputs from the technology are quicker to implement focused action plans enhancing engagement/experience."
As organizations embark on their search for a rounding solution, Mr. Vostal made the following recommendations: "Do the research and check references. That's huge. Make sure the vendor offers great customer service and has a plan for the future. One of the often-overlooked things is whether a vendor has the financial backing to survive and thrive for years to come."
Looking ahead, rounding solutions will help healthcare organizations create better staffing models and identify process improvement opportunities at scale. "The next step is using AI to automate rounding and capture analysis in real time," Mr. Vostal said. "Our goal is to use the data we have on patients and employees, so organizations can be smarter about how they round."