What causes burnout in healthcare? 6 key factors impacting clinicians today

• Organizational factors driving burnout in hospitals—such as alert fatigue, staffing constraints, and administrative burdens—continue to undermine employee well-being and organizational performance. 
• Disorganized care coordination shows how burnout develops over time in clinical environments; centralizing communication, improving secure messaging, and enhancing access to EHR data help improve patient outcomes. 
• Accurate on-call scheduling tools are essential for preventing burnout in healthcare while supporting stronger engagement and job fulfillment.  
• Education and resources also play a critical role in minimizing clinician burnout by discouraging inefficient workarounds that disrupt workflows.  

Clinician burnout, defined as “a job-related stress syndrome resulting in emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment,” is not a matter of motivation or resilience, but a complex issue in the medical landscape.  

While there has been encouraging momentum towards preventing burnout in healthcare, new findings from the State of Healthcare Communication report reveal a troubling trend: workplace stress increased by 89% compared to the previous year.  

Understanding the organizational factors driving burnout in hospitals requires a nuanced perspective. Differences in care delivery models, specialties, and patient populations 
mean that clinicians experience stress in various ways.  

By taking a closer look at how burnout develops over time in clinical environments, it’s easier to identify the causes and begin implementing meaningful strategies that better support care teams.  

Alert fatigue 

The noisy and fast-paced nature of hospitals makes it difficult for clinicians to focus and make the best decisions for their patients. Alert fatigue causes this sensory overload as care teams “become desensitized to safety alerts, and as a result ignore or fail to respond appropriately to such warnings.”  

For example, an intensive care unit (ICU) study found that clinicians experience an average of 64.1 passive alerts per patient each day, but only 4.5% represent true panic values.  

These interruptions disrupt workflows and erode trust in critical notification systems. Over time, alert fatigue contributes to burnout in healthcare by affecting clinicians’ well-being and ultimately patient experiences.  

Hospitals and health systems are increasingly looking to enterprise alert management solutions that deliver secure, actionable notifications directly to the right clinician’s device. Reducing this unnecessary noise and minimizing overhead announcements are a few ways to address the key causes of clinician burnout.  

Poor care coordination  

Modern clinical environments require advanced and emerging technology to meet evolving patient needs. As a result, many areas of collaboration can hit roadblocks, exacerbating burnout in healthcare workers.  

These obstacles are not theoretical. The State of Healthcare Communications report found that adopting too many secure messaging platforms create haphazard workflows and impact employee confidence.  

Care teams are increasingly becoming comprehensive interprofessional groups, deepening the risks of clinician burnout. However, with more open communication, nurses report a lower association with workplace stress.  

A centralized communication system—combining secure messaging, alerts, paging, staff directories, and contact center functions—enhances coordination by reducing the number of individual tools that clinicians need to manage patient care.  

Staffing shortages 

The National Center for Health Workforce Analysis (NCHWA) projects that by 2038, there will be a shortage of registered nurses in cities, with 11% in suburban and rural areas.  

When hospitals are understaffed, the remaining nurses often take on heavier workloads, mandatory overtime, and back-to-back shifts that are correlated to greater burnout in healthcare.  

Staffing shortages can contribute to adverse events, intensifying clinician burnout.
When nurse-to-patient ratios are too low, essential aspects of care are more likely to be missed, raising the risk of medication errors, patient falls, or even increased mortality.  

Equipping staff with effective tools, such as secure messaging, can help eliminate communication roadblocks that consume valuable time, allowing clinicians to devote more attention to patient care. 

Off-shift intrusions  

If hospitals rely on manual processes to create and update their on-call schedules, mistakes are bound to happen from human error.  

These outdated systems are worsened by healthcare organizations relying on HR information for their staff data, which may not accurately reflect how teams and departments are structured.  

The impact of inefficient clinical communication on staff burnout is evident in off-shift intrusions, where unnecessary calls, texts, or alerts reach clinicians when they’re not on duty. These disruptions limit time to rest and recharge, making it harder for them to return to work prepared for their patients.  

In fact, healthcare professionals who spend more time on EHR-related tasks outside of work are more likely to experience clinician burnout. 

Addressing this challenge requires implementing an on-call scheduling solution that routes up-to-date availability information, helping ensure communications are directed to the appropriate clinician at the appropriate time. 

Administrative burdens  

Today, 96% of hospitals rely on EHR systems designed to better organize patient information and improve its accuracy. 

At the same time, research suggests that EHRs have expanded administrative workloads and reshaped daily workflows; physicians are spending almost two hours on EHR and administrative work for every hour of clinical care.  

In another study, respondents reported that administrative tasks hindered their ability to provide high-quality care, shifting away from meaningful patient interactions and resulting in lower career satisfaction often seen with burnout in healthcare workers. 

By adopting communication tools that integrate with EHR data, alerts and orders are delivered with richer context, eliminating the need for clinicians to log into multiple systems or manually search for information. 

Lack of staff education  

Healthcare workers have varying levels of comfort with technology. If they aren’t confident using their tools—or inherit only partial knowledge from colleagues—they can become frustrated, losing time to trial-and-error and relying on workarounds. 

Over a third of healthcare workers (37%) already report feeling frustrated by their solutions, and nearly three in ten (28%) feel their organization doesn’t provide the necessary training to use them effectively. 

That’s why it’s paramount for organizations to provide education and resources, curated to specific roles and settings that are continuously updated as their solutions evolve and undergo product updates.  

With an estimated annual cost of $4.6 billion, burnout is a persistent challenge that needs to be addressed. As clinical environments become increasingly multifaceted, addressing them is more critical than ever. While technology alone can’t eliminate burnout, it plays a key role in supporting care teams and improving patient outcomes.