Published on March 23, 2021

Burnout, a condition characterized by emotional exhaustion, listlessness, and an inability to cope, is demonstrably more prevalent among healthcare providers than other occupations.  Burnout is fundamentally a longitudinal problem, but traditional instruments for measurement such as the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and the Professional Fulfillment Index (PFI) are time-consuming, expensive, and complex to administer, making it prohibitive to collect repeated measures to capture burnout feedback with weekly, monthly or even yearly frequency. A Single-Item Burnout Measure (SIBM) has been previously validated to highly correlate to the emotional exhaustion dimension of the MBI, and thus can serve as a proxy measure for burnout.  In this talk I’ll review the design considerations of a novel method for no-cost, low interruption distribution of surveys through the Electronic Medical Record message center, evaluate the feasibility and reliability of collecting repeated measures of physician burnout in the EMR, and discuss how this instrument can be combined with event logging data to continuously monitor and improve EMR-related causes of burnout.

Please contact Robert Sanders (sandersrl@missouri.edu) for Zoom information.