The pandemic was a real inflection point for healthcare’s workforce crisis — and many health systems are still trying to figure out how to recover, said Mallika Mendu, interim chief population health officer and vice president of clinical operations and care continuum at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
She made these comments during a panel held this week at the Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York City.
Clinicians’ stress and burnout levels were majorly exacerbated by the pandemic, causing thousands of healthcare workers to flee the industry. Mendu noted that this problem hasn’t gone away just because the public health emergency is over.
“For example, in the nursing home community, we saw that the 15% attrition rate has really not recovered very much. As a result of that, if we take the nursing home example, you then have fewer staff beds, then you have patients waiting in the hospital for longer, the EDs backing up, and that puts more strain on the healthcare workers that remain, particularly on the front line,” she remarked.
A dearth of workers leads to constraints for capacity in both outpatient and inpatient facilities — and that means that patients face care delays, Mendu added. By the time a patient is able to be seen, their case has often progressed to be a complex one — creating further strain on clinicians’ workload, she noted.
Another panelist — Tina Shah, chief clinical officer at clinical documentation AI startup Abridge — agreed with Mendu, saying she doesn’t think the providers’ burnout problem has gotten much better since the pandemic.
“Finally the physician burnout rate has dropped to below 50%, but most of us think that’s because they’re not there to answer the survey — not that the burnout rate has improved,” she declared.
Both panelists agreed that it’s not sustainable for healthcare providers to continue to operate with such a shortage of clinicians — and that fixing this problem requires a multifaceted approach.
In Mendu’s view, creating a more positive working environment is one change that can have a major impact on a clinician’s willingness to stay in their role. She said she has witnessed this firsthand during a meeting for the mortality review program she helps lead at Brigham and Women’s.
“We systematically review every death that occurs in the hospital. Doing so, we actually learned quite a bit when somebody would not only mention something that could have been improved, but actually what went right. When we fed that information back to the person it was referencing or the team it was referencing, it really had a positive impact. So then we started systematically collecting information about what went right. We called it our positive feedback question,” Mendu explained.
And Shah highlighted some “shining lights” she has seen emerge in response to healthcare’s burnout crisis. One is the rise of the chief wellbeing officer.
She described this title as “a point person that actually understands what it takes to redesign the workplace so that people don’t leave their jobs and that they practice the highest quality care.”
More and more hospitals are also adopting software to reduce administrative work, such as tools that help automate clinical documentation or prior authorization, Shah added.
“We’re starting to see huge reductions in administrative work — and 62% of doctors cite administrative work, clerical work, as the top cause of why they’re burning out and leaving the workforce,” she remarked.
She also noted that there are federal reforms to make prior authorization more seamless that will go into effect in 2026 — and there are various states working to pass laws that make this onerous process easier for clinicians.
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