Doctor burnout: 6 simple ways Legit.Health helps reduce it

Doctor burnout, a serious problem

Burnout is, as put by the World Health Organization, an occupational phenomenon consequence of chronic distress associated with the job. It includes emotional exhaustion and irritability, the gradual loss of empathy and the increase in negative feelings such as cynicism, and a sense that your own professional effectiveness is rapidly decreasing.

An issue such as this, which plagues the medical care systems across the world seems to extend beyond borders, cultures and languages, must have roots in the intrinsic nature of the medical practice.

Although it seems we cannot eliminate doctor burnout completely, at least not just yet, it is our duty as a community to analyse the cultural, social and economic causes of this epidemic that affects one of the most crucial jobs in our modern welfare society.

A bad situation, made worse by COVID-19

Even prior to the global pandemic that has shaken the medical care world to its core, doctor burnout was a persistent and widespread problem. 

The long hours, the emotional and physical exhaustion and the feeling of powerlessness, when faced with a system that often seems antagonistic and difficult to navigate, have only exacerbated the cases of doctors running on an empty tank. 

The pandemic has reverted many recent improvements made in managing doctor workloads and wellbeing. Three in five doctors report being worn out at the end of a working day and 44% felt their work was emotionally exhausting.

To put this kind of strain on the backs of the professionals that take care of our health can have disastrous consequences for both the physicians and their patients. Until the systemic causes of this issue are addressed, measures must be taken in order to minimize doctor burnout.

6 Ways Legit.Health reduces doctor burnout

Legit.Health is the revolutionary Clinical Data and Communication tool for Next-generation dermatologists that triples the empowerment of patients.

The purpose of deep learning algorithms used in Legit.Health is to help doctors make an informed decision, putting all the processing power and stored data of a cutting-edge computation at the service of the physician’s performance.

Legit.Health‘s algorithms automatically grade lesions just by looking at smartphone images and small patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). In other words: the tool will automatically fill in most of the dermatology scoring systems, such as PASI, SCORAD, UAS, as well as estimate the pre-malignancy of any lesion.

How does this revolutionary tool for next-generation doctors work?

1- Minimize the time spent on menial tasks

One of the main causes of doctor burnout is not having enough quality time with the patients. After all, the doctor has dedicated years of training to be able to help people, and spending time performing tasks that seem unimportant is quite frustrating.

This is especially true in dermatology, where they often need to linger counting lessons or calculating affected area and severity scores instead of actually interacting with the patient. Sadly, to this day, the best the market could offer to doctors looking to make these tasks easier and faster were digital calculators that still require a high degree of attention. 

Thanks to Legit.Health, that has changed, as the new algorithmic artificial intelligence tool can diagnose a pathology and determine its severity in less than 23 seconds, reducing the burnout in doctors who want to focus on the person in front of them.

2- Reduce time spent generating a paper trail

Many doctors feel that to keep up in their field and carry on with a successful career, they need to be published in top journals. This frustration forces them to carry out the complex clinical trials that push the borders of scientific progress beyond what could be imagined a decade ago.

However, the lack of time in the hands of these physicians supposes a problem yet another time, as the requirements to carry on this kind of study often imply a heavy paper trail that must be kept up to date with precise data. This supposes more time spent filling in forms and registering information manually, leading to more doctor burnout.

Legit.Health helps set up both traditional and decentralized clinical trials thanks to its many algorithmic functions such as our pixel-to-CSV converters, automatic patient-reported outcome measures, match inclusion algorithms and dermatology image quality algorithms. 

All this technology is put in the hands of the doctor to make the data collecting process not only fast but also more accurate and objective, as the algorithm doesn’t hold any of the bias a human might.

3- Makes communication with the patient easier

Another of the causes of doctor burnout is the perception of a loss of connection with the patient and their needs, as many physicians feel like they are forced to focus on data and statistics and not on the human side of the trade.

It is a well-known fact that the communication between doctor and patient is one of the cornerstones of modern medicine, and the efforts to make that communication more fluid and effective should not fall on the physician’s shoulders alone. 

That’s why one of the biggest focuses of Legit.Health is streamlining the communication by making the process as smooth as possible, connecting patient and doctor through an app that allows for messages, pictures, and requests not only to be filled in remotely but also filtered by priority. All this makes the communication happening at the appropriate pace for the physician.

4- Makes the pressure of over-specialization less impactful

The medical profession is one of the more specialized fields in the world, as some cases need expert knowledge not only in the field of choice but in the specific disease the patient is suffering. 

This over-specialization is an especially impactful problem in the case of primary care physicians, who have to confront a wide range of potential diseases without the tools to properly diagnose or treat them due to a lack of specialized knowledge.

Legit.Health puts in the hands of doctors the consolidated expertise of top experts in each disease, combined with all the processing power of our deep learning algorithms, giving a faster and more reliable second opinion there is. 

This is useful to both the primary care doctors who will benefit from having access to an objective and fast way of accessing the knowledge of specialists without investing too much time in consulting manuals, and for the dermatologist who might encounter a disease or lesion out of their expertise and want a reliable tool to confirm their suspicions.

In both cases, the pressure of needing to know it all is reduced, and so is doctor burnout.

5- Is completely compliant with most regulations, including GDPR

One of the biggest causes of doctor burnout is having to deal with nonmedical matters such as regulations, as many feel they didn’t devote their life to the practice of medicine to then expend their limited time and energy on such comparatively menial matters.

Of course, despite not being a very appealing job, taking care of regulations, normative and patient data are crucial for the proper workflow of a medical centre, and it’s a task that someone should take care of.
That’s why at Legit.Health we have put a strong focus on making it easier to comply with all those regulations, being the GDPR the best example of how we approach data protection and how we take this work off the shoulders of doctors, so they can focus on what’s important.

6- Reducing the number of patient complaints

Lastly, we have to consider the pressure patient complaints put on the back of the doctors. They are of course a valuable tool to avoid malpractice, but often the fear, lack of knowledge or a misunderstanding can be the cause of a non-deserved complaint. 

The strain this puts on physicians contributes to the burnout effect greatly, and the solution to it is clear: to reduce the number of complaints, not by making it harder for the patients to speak their voice, but by reducing the instances where those complaints are not deserved.

A better informed and more satisfied patient is less likely to misunderstand or misrepresent a situation, thus improving the patient’s experience, we reduce the stress on the doctor. 

Legit.Health strives to improve the communication between patient and doctor, making the patient feel understood and in control. Better informed patients make better decisions, take their treatment more seriously, and trust their doctor more.

In conclusion

When we set ourselves to the task of creating the perfect tool to have an impact on our users’ quality of life, we did it with both patients and doctors in mind.

We have taken into account the experiences of doctors and the extensive literature produced about this topic in the last years to develop our software so it makes the life of the doctors who use it easier and less stressful. 

The main objective is, and will always be, to improve the performance of the doctor and to increase the patient’s quality of life.