Abstract

We study the problem of clinician well-being, through the lens of burnout, using an alternate source of data – large, unstructured, publicly available 55,441 reviews written by clinicians on Glassdoor.com from 2012 to 2020. First, we employ topic mining and qualitative coding methods to identify contributing factors to clinician well-being and draw comparisons with electronic health records (EHR), a well-studied yet controversial factor in clinician burnout. Surprisingly, EHR or IT related keywords are not prominent in clinicians' discourse. Instead, routine operations emerge as the most frequently mentioned topic in the pros and cons sections of the reviews. Since routine operational issues are influenced by IT use, we leverage organizational routines theory and application integration theory to propose a midrange “routines theory of employee well-being” that explains how managing organizational routines through IS can help improve clinician well-being. We test the proposed theory using econometric models and find that integrating workflow (WI) applications significantly enhances clinician well-being. In contrast, integrating documentation (DI) applications does not exhibit a significant impact. Interestingly, we also observe that the effects of WI and DI are more pronounced in hospitals with higher ratings of work-life balance or lower patient-to-nurse ratios, highlighting the critical role of staffing levels in driving the impact of EHR integration on clinician well-being. Overall, this is the first study to theorize and unravel the latent, intricate relationship between EHR and clinician burnout, which is moderated by organizational factors such as work-life-balance policies and staffing levels.

DOI

10.17705/1jais.00940

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