Harnessing Technology to Enhance Family Engagement and Alleviate Clinician Burnout in Acute Healthcare

The rapid advancement of medical technologies has revolutionized acute healthcare, enabling more sophisticated monitoring, interventions, and decision support than ever before. However, the proliferation of devices and systems has also contributed to increasing complexity, alert fatigue, and clinician documentation burdens. As a result, technology intended to improve care delivery has paradoxically become a key driver of clinician burnout in acute healthcare settings.

By harnessing technologies to activate families as co-participants in acute care, we can improve patient and family experience, clinical outcomes, and clinician satisfaction.

We need a paradigm shift in designing and implementing acute healthcare technologies to address this challenge. Rather than focusing solely on expanding technological capabilities, we must prioritize solutions that optimize technologies to empower patients, reduce workloads, and save costs while enhancing the human aspects of care delivery. This requires a user-centered approach that deeply involves frontline clinicians in the development process to ensure that technologies align with their needs and seamlessly integrate into practice.

One promising area is leveraging technologies to meaningfully engage patients' families as partners in acute care. Family members are a vital source of support, information, and advocacy for acutely ill patients, yet they often face significant challenges in navigating the complex and unfamiliar healthcare environment. Emerging digital tools can empower families by providing user-friendly platforms to access and contribute to medical records, facilitate communication with the clinical team, and document their unique insights into the patient's care needs and preferences.

For example, patient portals tailored for the acute care setting could enable families to securely message clinicians, view real-time updates on the patient's status, and access curated education on diagnoses, treatments, and equipment. Allowing families to enter information into structured fields of the EHR, such as the patient's baseline functional status or advanced care directives, can provide valuable context to guide clinical decision-making. Additionally, digital diaries where families document the patient's acute care experience and progress can humanize care and strengthen continuity across handoffs and provider changes.

Importantly, such family engagement technologies must be thoughtfully designed to integrate with clinician workflows and avoid increasing clerical burdens. Natural language processing and AI can help auto-generate EHR documentation from family messages and diaries, saving clinicians time on data entry. Intelligent algorithms can triage and route family queries to the appropriate team member and proactively deliver personalized educational content to address common concerns. User-friendly dashboards can provide at-a-glance summaries of family input and highlight key issues for clinician follow-up.

By harnessing technologies to activate families as co-participants in acute care, we can improve patient and family experience, clinical outcomes, and clinician satisfaction. Enlisting families as engaged and informed partners reduces the burden on clinicians to relay updates, clarify information, and make treatment decisions in isolation. Enabling bi-directional, convenient communication between families and the healthcare team fosters constructive relationships and mitigates conflicts. Capturing families' rich contextual knowledge enhances patient-centered decision-making and care delivery.

As acute healthcare technologies continue to rapidly evolve, it is imperative that we focus on developing solutions that empower both clinicians and families, streamline workflows, and uphold humanistic, compassionate care. We can design and implement innovations that synergistically enhance care quality while reducing documentation burden and technology-mediated inefficiencies as key contributors to clinician burnout only through close collaboration among technology developers, researchers, clinicians, patients, and families. Strategic investment in optimized, user-centered technologies that activate patients' families as capable partners is essential for building an acute healthcare ecosystem that enables clinicians and families to collaboratively deliver the best possible care to acutely ill patients.

Steven L Calver 

MS-PhD