{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02134423251589464, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004087193460490463, 'mean_word_length': 5.696048632218845, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Estimating the Attributable Cost of Physician Burnout in the United States

IN RESPONSE: More than one third of physicians, residents, and medical students experience substantial symptoms of burnout (1, 2). Programs designed to help affected persons recover and to lower barriers to treatment, such as the one established by the Oregon Wellness Coalition, are therefore vital to helping our community heal. However, it is time for us to move beyond providing support for those in distress and instead focus on improving the practice environment to prevent excessive work stress and burnout in the first place. Practice improvement and innovation are complex. Processes and procedures are deeply ingrained in routine, team members can feel threatened and be reluctant to change, and patient care needs to continue uninterrupted. Despite these challenges, existing data suggest that organizational-level interventions are feasible and probably more effective than individual-level ones (3). Successfully addressing the underlying drivers of burnout will require resources and investment to bring about meaningful, sustained structural change. Our analysis indicating the profound economic cost of physician burnout on the health care delivery system provides a strong rationale to invest sufficient resources to address this problem. For the average organization with 200 physicians, physician turnover and reduced clinical hours attributable to burnout cost $1.5 million per year. Measuring physician well-being at regular intervals, developing and implementing interventions to improve the practice environment, taking specific steps to reduce workplace isolation, and equipping leaders with transformational and participatory leadership skills are necessary first steps. Vanguard institutions, professional societies, and other stakeholders should fund organizational science to develop and test systems-level approaches to prevent and reduce physician burnout. The moral and economic cases to address this issue have been made. Now it is time for organizations, payors, regulators, and the profession to improve the practice environment for the sake of patients, physicians, and society at large (4).