Grant: Health System Impact Fellowships - Doctoral Central 1-year

Electronic health record (EHR) systems have an important role in supporting the delivery of care. However, as these systems become more advanced with innovative features (e.g., clinical decision support), clinicians including physicians and nurses are reporting unintended consequences related to excessive administrative burden and burnout. In an effort to mitigate these issues, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), a large academic and teaching hospital, have recently implemented the Physician Engagement Strategy. This strategy aims to increase effective and efficient use of the EHR through a number of interventions including enhanced education/training to end-users, increased leadership and inter-departmental collaborations, and better access to speech recognition technology. The current project aims to evaluate and optimize the impact of these interventions on reducing physician burnout at the organization. By engaging physicians in the development and implementation of an evaluation strategy that encompasses multiple sources of data (i.e., surveys, interviews and back-end analytics usage data), the findings will help characterize the impact of these interventions on addressing EHR-related burden and inform next steps on optimizing the delivery of the strategy. By evaluating and optimizing the organizational efforts on reducing EHR-related burnout, it will help support CAMH in achieving their impact goal of positioning mental health at the centre of health care.