Summary
Objectives: 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.
Methods: 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.
Results: 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.
Conclusions: 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.
Keywords
Decision Support Systems - Clinical - burnout - professional - Electronic Health Records
