What if there were a better way for technology to help patients without burning out clinicians? This has been debated in the NEJM recently (Singh et al, 2023).
Clinicians’ digital work has drastically increased since COVID-19. For example, the number of messages from patients grew by 57% at the outset of the pandemic and has remained at that level. In addition, increased use of telemedicine has led to an increase in ‘work-after-work’ using electronic patient records (EPRs) – a worrying effect.
Cal Newport, the Professor of Computer Science has coined the term ‘digital minimalism’. He believes in the idea that it is important not only to reduce the anxiety-inducing background hum of social media, but also professional information.
For example, he describes a company whose employees switched from being constantly available, to communicating only during scheduled times – leaving more uninterrupted time for completion of high-value work. If digital minimalism is applied to medicine, its tenets may provide insight into the drivers of burnout.
It is easy to see how digital minimalism’s first tenet ‘clutter is costly’, applies: a single patient’s EPR has 56% as many words as Shakespeare’s longest play, Hamlet. Moreover, half these words are simply duplicated from previous documentation.
Furthermore electronic interruptions such as secure chat messages from other staff members (e.g. Microsoft Teams) contribute to clinicians’ cognitive load, potentially exacerbating fatigue, increasing errors in patient care, and causing burnout. Digital minimalisation may be key to reducing clinician workload and burnout in the future.
