Powerful dictation software fights growing burnout in the healthcare sector
The immense burden of time management is a growing fault line in the healthcare industry, where staff are under immense pressure to not only accurately serve their patient base, but maintain proper documentation as well.
Over the years, a rise in patient visits in routine, hospital, and emergency scenarios has increased. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the mounting problems of physician burnout reached an all-time high, leading to increased stress, decreased efficiency, and a cycle of internal problems. Even before the pandemic, burnout was a significant problem. In 2015, for example, burnout was a growing concern with physicians and healthcare workers.
How do I know if I’m dealing with burnout?
Burnout is a series of symptoms associated with extreme stress over long periods of time. Everyone can experience it, but it’s especially prevalent in healthcare, as patient emergencies are not scheduled and thus can’t be planned around for time off. Physicians can face back-to-back shifts exceeding 12 hours, with labor going beyond patient care. Paperwork and documentation are a key aspect of proper medical care, one which requires attention to detail. Burnout, though, greatly interferes with this task.
Symptoms of burnout:
- Fatigue, feeling of exhaustion that lingers even after periods of rest
- Decreased concentration on tasks (especially in medical environments)
- Emotional strain from feelings of depression, sadness, frustration, anger, and detachment
To reliably address these concerns, significant changes are needed to both workload and the industry as a whole. Right now, however, professionals utilize tools offering benefits and cut into said workload.
How do I address physician burnout?
Ideally, dealing with burnouts means identifying and eliminating stress factors. But again, in healthcare work, that’s not really an option. Emergency scenarios and general medical work have a high demand for patient needs.
However, there is good news. Burnout can be greatly reduced by taking advantage of the right tools. Specifically, Dragon’s dictation software, a suite that greatly reduces the burden and tedium of mountainous paperwork. Given the nature and importance medical documentation before, during, and after patient visits, this is a key part of reducing burnout and stress in a medical service environment. A hands-free approach – possible with this software – can make the difference between accurate patient info or having to redo entire documents because of errors.
Dragon Medical provides plenty of frictionless resources to its physician base, but we’ll highlight our favorites which also address burnout and fatigue concerns.
Dragon Medical One is a speech-recognition program which provides accurate, accessible notes to its client base. It’s portable with built in cloud integration, and lets physicians get to their notes as soon as they need to.
You don’t take the work home with you.
Physicians and healthcare professionals face a time challenge. Because of their need to properly document patient info and relevant visitor notes, they’re pressed to do so when they’re at home to. Being at home is very important for destressing. Dragon Medical One addresses this, however, by allowing for immediate, accurate data creation.
No typing required.
Some are great on the keyboard, some aren’t. But even if they are, physically recording data and information can take much longer than simple dictation. With Dragon Medical One’s dictation accuracy, physicians and professionals can quickly create reports with voice alone.
Accessible and frictionless setup.
Dragon Medical One removes the barrier to complex set ups, accessible by all staff and physician professionals. Begin dictating in minutes, reducing downtime with other traditional dictation software solutions.
Secure and reliable.
Finally, Dragon Medical One is HIPAA-compliant and entirely secure, utilizing cloud infrastructure by Microsoft Azure. None of your dictated audio or converted text is ever stored which keeps your patient information protected and isolated to your environment.
The benefits listed are only a handful of the numerous applications Dragon Medical One has in a medical setting. But among them, these directly address the causes of burnout in a stressful, high-demand job.
