Reports

On the heels of COVID-19, the healthcare industry is facing a second epidemic—one of clinician turnover. Grappling with burnout and misaligned priorities between themselves and organization leaders, many clinicians are considering their options: do they stay with their current organization, seek employment at another hospital or clinic, or leave healthcare altogether? For healthcare organizations, failing to address these challenges will lead to high turnover costs and further frustration for clinicians who remain.

To better understand this epidemic, the KLAS Arch Collaborative is—for the first time—asking clinicians who report plans to leave their organization where they intend to go. This report examines the cost of clinician turnover, how burnout and the EHR experience affect staff retention, and best practices from organizations who have improved their clinicians’ satisfaction and reversed turnover trends.

Clinician burnout is an important problem facing the healthcare industry. While previous Arch Collaborative research has explored the issue across all clinicians, this report narrows the focus specifically to nurses, one-quarter of whom report some degree of burnout. What are some of the most commonly reported causes of this burnout, and can any EHR-satisfaction best practices also help reduce burnout?

• CHIME’s Most Wired (levels 8–10)
• CMS Star ratings (5-star organizations)
• Healthgrades (America’s 100 Best Hospitals list)
• Leapfrog (Top Hospitals list)
• US News and World Report (Best Hospitals list)

Today, achieving EHR satisfaction is a global endeavor as digitization of patient records becomes more and more common throughout the world. This report aims to increase awareness of the similarities and differences in EHR challenges faced by US and non-US health systems. To date, 189 organizations across the globe have measured the feedback of their clinicians (totaling >90,000 responses) and have received benchmarking data comparing them to similar organizations. 13 of these organizations are outside the United States. Do non-US health systems have a different perception of their EHR compared to US organizations? And if there are differences, what can each group learn from the other?

In most ways, US and non-US health systems have similar experiences with their EHRs. For both groups, system reliability and internal integration are the two aspects of the EHR generating most satisfaction. The areas where more significant differences appear are efficiency (non-US health systems

We built EMRs to help clinicians deliver dramatically bettercare and to be more efficient in that care. If clinicianseverywhere consistently praised EMRs for revolutionizingthe practice of medicine, wouldn't that be an indication thatthe EMR was a success?

But that is not happening.

In late 2016, in an effort to turn the tide of EMR frustration,KLAS gathered with a handful of provider organizationswith the idea of creating a common end-user satisfactionsurvey to be used as a means of establishing satisfactionbenchmarks and enabling provider organizations to learnfrom each other’s successes and failures. Today, this effort—called the Arch Collaborative—has collected 15,535 userperspectives from 55 organizations.