Addressing Burnout Through Education and Technology

By Matt Phillion

In a recent study from athenahealth, 69% of physicians noted spending too much time after hours on clinical documentation in electronic health records. It’s a refrain we have heard often and one that is taking a toll: 62% of physicians polled cited “excessive documentation requirements” as the leading cause of burnout.

Burnout took center stage during the pandemic as medical professionals began leaving the industry, but it remains a multifaceted crisis in 2025. What can organizations do to optimize their workflows, streamline front-office processes, and enhance the quality of care?

“If we rewind back a few years to the onset of COVID, providers, nurses, and frontline workers faced a different type of burden and a different type of burnout,” says Hari Prasad, CEO of Yosi Health. “They were dealing with the pandemic on the front lines, taking care of patients while also having concerns about their own well-being.”

The industry was seeing incredibly high turnover rates then, with many never returning to healthcare once they left.

“We’ve successfully gotten past the [pandemic-specific burnout issues], but at the same time we’ve had persistent issues within the industry that haven’t gone anywhere, foundational issues that are a huge burden and causing a lot of burnout,” says Prasad. “If any other industry was showing 94% of stakeholders were feeling burned out and struggling under an administrative burden that would ring alarm bells everywhere. But we continue to deal with 93% of physicians who feel burned out, a very stark number and very stark reminder as to how serious the problem is.”

To deal with today’s level of burnout among physicians and other providers, we need to not just look at today’s problems but historical issues that have persisted, Prasad explains.

“We need to look years back, and consider the requirements placed on physician documentation,” he says. “Every interaction, every conversation, every piece of information is documented for legal and reimbursement reasons. It’s not just a requirement but a necessity as it’s the only way healthcare organizations can keep track of patients and help them improve their health, otherwise we have no measurable outcomes.”

All of these incentives are aligned to improve patient outcomes, Prasad explains, but they also change the way physicians interact with patients and spend their time.

“There are a wide range of valid reasons they end up spending so much time documenting patient interactions, but it is also one of the things that has placed significant burden on them,” he says. “As they are providing care and support to the patient, a 30-minute appointment with the physician also requires a tremendous amount of effort and time to capture all the information.”

Leveraging tech and empowering the patient

There is already quite a bit of existing technology available that can be used to improve the documentation process, Prasad notes.

“This technology could be used in a more widespread manner to reduce burnout,” he says.

There is also a great opportunity to put some of that control back in the hands of the patient.

“We can empower the patient to take a more active role,” Prasad says. “If you’re trying to solve the physician burden, who are the others involved in that framework, and how can we activate them to get them to do better and to help alleviate some of that burden? If we empower the patient to provider their own history, allergies, all those things we spend time collecting and documenting that’s one thing we can do to reduce burnout.”

So much information is collected up front as part of the patient history and intake, Prasad explains.

Technology exists that can focus on the patient interaction, Prasad said, but if it is fully integrated with the EHR, it could go a long way toward reducing burnout.

“This way, the physician is not required to use other technology to get information from the chart,” he says. “Any tech that offers or extends full integration into the medical system can reduce burnout.”

The question of EHR interoperability remains a challenge across the board for the industry.

“The fragmentation that exists within the industry means we are not at a level of intermobility, where patients may not even have access to their medical records,” he says. “It severely hampers the collection of the patient profile to begin with. If we’re able to tap into different sources to see their entire medication profile, it’s really transformative.”

This would take some of the burden off the patient as well, Prasad explains.

“We’re then not dependent on the patient to create the full medical history. Right now, we need to depend on the patient to provide some of that information, but this would reduce the error rate or incidence of lack of information from the patient,” Prasad explains. “These are the medications I’m taking, these are the meds I stopped taking, and by the way I started taking a new medication—we’re instead able to establish a baseline of their medication health.”

A challenge the industry runs into at this stage is the proprietary nature of the information involved.

“Patients at the end of the day never own the data about them,” says Prasad. “So each system or organization they go to have access to that information but they’re not sharing it across different systems or clinics. It’s a cultural barrier. We need to adapt and embrace better ways to handle patient information.”

And like with any technological problem, we run into the challenge of systems that simply are not designed to work with each other.

“They are designed to support their operation workflows within their ecosystem but not connecting to third-party systems,” says Prasad. “It’s better than it was five or 10 years back, but there are also improvements that need to be made for systems to exchange information between each other.”

Regulations can help with this regard.

“There need to be regulations in place for the patient to be able to access all their information, for a whole host of reasons,” says Prasad. “The proliferation of the Health Information Exchange was meant to make sure care providers have access to patient information across the continuum of care. The patient has access to their own information—it’s their health. Patient portals play a role in this but that patient portal is not interoperable with other systems. Anyone not sharing that portal has challenges sharing information.”

There are other barriers, Prasad explains, such as if information using the same EHR system that cannot share information with another system on the same EHR technology.

“We’re doing the best we can to protect patient data, but as a result, it’s severely hampering how we can share data with other providers,” says Prasad.

There are a lot of stakeholders who can, and should, get involved and can play a key role with improving these areas, Prasad notes.

“State and federal legislators can advocate data sharing that is less complex. Right now, there’s a lot of lack of clarity in terms of what the guidelines are for data sharing, and they can play a role in making sure those guidelines are clear,” he says. “Healthcare organizations can come together to share information and communicate with each other.”

Physicians also have an opportunity to push for improvement.

“At the end of the day, who is truly providing the care? They are,” says Prasad. “They are spending 15 to 16 hours a day working and that is not sustainable.”

The industry needs to look beyond just physician voices and look at the whole ecosystem.

“Employed physicians who are part of a larger system can look for ways to make their voices heard advocating for system changes,” says Prasad.

Recognizing these larger concerns is a strong start in the right direction, he adds.

“I think we’re looking at incremental change,” Prasad says. “There is a very specific set of things causing burnout, so we’re looking at smaller steps to reduce that burnout.”

Those incremental steps include better integration between technologies, and greater diligence when choosing a new technology or system to ensure it doesn’t conflict with existing solutions or add to the cognitive burden of the provider.

That component of helping patients be more educated and active in their own health is a huge step forward, Prasad notes.

“The patient may not always have the information they need. If we start empowering them and providing the right tools, it’s a great way to drive patient engagement,” he says.

Matt Phillion is a freelance writer covering healthcare, cybersecurity, and more. He can be reached at matthew.phillion@gmail.com.