Clinical Decision Support and Implications for the Clinician Burnout Crisis

This survey aimed to review aspects of clinical decision support (CDS) that contribute to burnout and identify key themes for improving the acceptability of CDS to clinicians, with the goal of decreasing said burnout.

We performed a survey of relevant articles from 2018-2019 addressing CDS and aspects of clinician burnout from PubMed and Web of Science™. Themes were manually extracted from publications that met inclusion criteria.

Eighty-nine articles met inclusion criteria, including 12 review articles. Review articles were either prescriptive, describing how CDS should work, or analytic, describing how current CDS tools are deployed. The non-review articles largely demonstrated poor relevance and acceptability of current tools, and few studies showed benefits in terms of efficiency or patient outcomes from implemented CDS. Encouragingly, multiple studies highlighted steps that succeeded in improving both acceptability and relevance of CDS.

CDS can contribute to clinician frustration and burnout. Using the techniques of improving relevance, soliciting feedback, customization, measurement of outcomes and metrics, and iteration, the effects of CDS on burnout can be ameliorated.