Why More and More Startups are Rushing to Extinguish Burnout

Joel Landau
2 min readOct 31, 2022

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By Joel Landau

With physician burnout an ever-growing concern in the medical community, technology companies are rushing to address its root cause — administrative burden.

Specifically, those vendors that deal in artificial intelligence have developed products that improve pre-visit evaluations, triaging and transcribing administrative billing. They also positively impact the manner in which lab work is processed. In all, 500 healthcare AI companies raised some $12 billion in 2021 , and not a moment too soon, considering the precarious state of clinicians’ well-being.

When the pandemic was at its height, it was as if doctors were “running a sprint and a marathon at the same time,” as Susan Hingle, past chair of the American College of Physicians (ACP), told the website Medical Economics — i.e., they were juggling the short- and long-term impact of the virus.

“The nation’s health depends on the well-being of our health workforce. Confronting the long-standing drivers of burnout among our health workers must be a top national priority. COVID-19 has been a uniquely traumatic experience for the health workforce and for their families, pushing them past their breaking point. Now, we owe them a debt of gratitude and action. And if we fail to act, we will place our nation’s health at risk.”

There is the belief among some, like Farzad Soleimani, an assistant professor in emergency medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and a partner at the San Francisco-based venture-capital firm 1984 Ventures, that AI can in time “turn every physician into a super-physician.” That’s because, Soleimani told the website Fast Company, clinicians must ultimately “learn to recognize patterns,” specifically in data.

AI can do that more quickly and efficiently. And that will, at least in theory, reduce physicians’ administrative workload, and along with it, the possibility of burnout. Doctors would then be free to focus their attention where it should always be — on the patient.

Originally published at https://joellandau.com on October 31, 2022.

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Joel Landau
Joel Landau

Written by Joel Landau

Joel Landau (http://joellandau.com) is an experienced healthcare professional in the NYC community.

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