Burnout as a source of Transformation and Innovation

Conducting a search led me to discover that burnout was originally addressed in 1974. Clinical psychologist Herbert Freudenberger used the word burnout to describe, “excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources” accompanied by symptoms including “malaise, fatigue, frustration, cynicism, and inefficacy” during his work as a volunteer at a free clinic."

This has been a concept for 50 years! Where we are with burnout numbers is frankly unacceptable isn't it? Because I just can't hug the status quo, it doesn't work for me that we are worse off with burnout now than we were 10, 20, 30 years ago by some studies. We have made great strides in medicine but seem to have taken a step back in advancing job satisfaction for clinical team members. If this is the case, my mind goes directly to pondering what we might be missing and how we can do this differently. I believe it is because we haven't asked deep enough questions, conducted deep enough immersion, and used a framework that helps us get to the causal reasons.

People want to make progress. There is a structured way to understand this progress and a way to measure it. In this next section, I will share that approach and also give examples of what I think we have missed over the years and what to do.

The Jobs to Be Done theory is a tool for deeply understanding peoples' struggle for progress and then creating the right solution and experiences to make sure you deliver delight every time. Now before someone fusses about theory I want to recount what Clay Christensen, et. all offered. "Good theory helps us understand the how and why. It helps us understand how the world works". The Jobs to Be Done theory offers that people want to make progress on three dimensions; functional (the task to complete or problem to solve), social (how we want to be perceived while making progress) and emotional ( how we want to feel while making progress). When people experience friction in any of those dimensions, we fail to deliver their love metric. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/love-metric-todd-dunn/

To change the trajectory of burnout and people leaving healthcare, I am offering that if we still have the problem after 50 years that we may want to change our approach. What I have not seen us do well is dive very deeply into defining burnout through three lenses. I also haven't seen often enough the deep immersion that it takes to truly see, feel, hear, etc. the root causes. I wrote about rounding vs grounding here: https://shorturl.at/cILN5 In my opinion, changing the course of this after 50 years will require deep grounding and utilizing the JTBD framework to help us experience and unpack what we need to know to change this course.

Using the JTBD theory and framework, immersion, questions, etc. works. I am not speaking from opinion; I am speaking from experience when I say that I KNOW that taking an empathetic mindset and using JTBD theory and framework, along with deep immersion, deep questions, and looking at data that we can remove friction that causes burnout.

Let me cite a few.

1. My team and I dove deeply into the friction of measuring and managing wounds and we found a solution that digitizes wound measurement across the inpatient, clinic, and home settings, which removes friction.
2. My team and I dove deeply into the friction in dialysis and revamped key pieces of the business model. We removed the documentation friction by picking a solution that integrates directly into the EMR, enables dialysis at home, which can remove friction for patients to experience dialysis where they want. We also saved millions in hard dollar savings! This is also saving nurses more than an hour each day in documentation time.
3. My team and i spent time in ORs and ICUs to better understand kidney management. We found that the kidney is manually managed today from urine flow to urine measurement to intra-abdominal pressure, etc. MANUAL! Yes, nurses often have to pick up tubes full of urine to get urine flowing, manually enter urine measurements, sometimes pour urine in a beaker to know the measurements, etc. We found Accuryn Medical as an option to completely digitize the kidney and remove the functional and emotional friction for nurses. Accuryn will have a significant impact on protecting patients' kidneys by helping prevent CAUTI and AKI while positively impacting the cost of healthcare. It removes friction that causes burnout.

Even things that are seen as micro-friction causes burnout by consistently repeating these micro-friction events. If your organization feels stuck in helping reduce burnout for your teams, please reach out. I am very passionate about helping employees enjoy their work and removing burnout. The friction leading to burnout is a source of innovation, which drives organizational transformation on many levels.