Frustration With Technology and its Relation to Emotional Exhaustion Among Health Care Workers: Cross-sectional Observational Study.
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2021-07-06
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Abstract
Background
New technology adoption is common in health care, but it may elicit frustration if end users are not sufficiently considered in their design or trained in their use. These frustrations may contribute to burnout.Objective
This study aimed to evaluate and quantify health care workers' frustration with technology and its relationship with emotional exhaustion, after controlling for measures of work-life integration that may indicate excessive job demands.Methods
This was a cross-sectional, observational study of health care workers across 31 Michigan hospitals. We used the Safety, Communication, Operational Reliability, and Engagement (SCORE) survey to measure work-life integration and emotional exhaustion among the survey respondents. We used mixed-effects hierarchical linear regression to evaluate the relationship among frustration with technology, other components of work-life integration, and emotional exhaustion, with adjustment for unit and health care worker characteristics.Results
Of 15,505 respondents, 5065 (32.7%) reported that they experienced frustration with technology on at least 3-5 days per week. Frustration with technology was associated with higher scores for the composite Emotional Exhaustion scale (r=0.35, P<.001) and each individual item on the Emotional Exhaustion scale (r=0.29-0.36, P<.001 for all). Each 10-point increase in the frustration with technology score was associated with a 1.2-point increase (95% CI 1.1-1.4) in emotional exhaustion (both measured on 100-point scales), after adjustment for other work-life integration items and unit and health care worker characteristics.Conclusions
This study found that frustration with technology and several other markers of work-life integration are independently associated with emotional exhaustion among health care workers. Frustration with technology is common but not ubiquitous among health care workers, and it is one of several work-life integration factors associated with emotional exhaustion. Minimizing frustration with health care technology may be an effective approach in reducing burnout among health care workers.Type
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Tawfik, Daniel S, Amrita Sinha, Mohsen Bayati, Kathryn C Adair, Tait D Shanafelt, J Bryan Sexton and Jochen Profit (2021). Frustration With Technology and its Relation to Emotional Exhaustion Among Health Care Workers: Cross-sectional Observational Study. Journal of medical Internet research, 23(7). p. e26817. 10.2196/26817 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/23670.
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John Bryan Sexton
Bryan is the Director of the Duke Center for the Advancement of Well-being Science. He leads the efforts around research, training and coaching, guiding quality improvement and well-being activities.
A psychologist member of the Department of Psychiatry, Bryan is a psychometrician and spends time developing methods of assessing and improving safety culture, teamwork, leadership and especially work-force well-being. Currently, he is disseminating the results from a successful NIH R01 grant that used RCTs to show that we can cause enduring improvements in healthcare worker well-being.
A perpetually recovering father of four, he enjoys running, using hand tools on wood, books on Audible, and hearing particularly good explanations of extremely complicated topics.
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