What’s Driving Staff Burnout in Your Back Office?

Most conversations about burnout focus on providers. Given the current state of healthcare in the US, that comes as no surprise--but what about the other important players that help keep a practice operational?

Front-office and back-office staff are experiencing their own version of burnout. For them, the different software and systems put in place to make their jobs easier often end up causing the most harm, through information stopgaps and increased manual task requirements.

In this blog, we focus on the true causes behind back-office burnout, how it impacts your practice, and what the solution for these day-to-day headaches is.

Burnout Isn’t Always About Workload

While workload can certainly contribute to staff and provider burnout, it’s not always the sole culprit. Staff frustration often comes from inefficient processes that eat up time and effort, leaving little time for focused patient support or professional development.

Poorly designed or implemented workflows can cause more burnout than the workload itself--and here’s what that looks like.

The Daily Frustrations Driving Burnout

Constant Context Switching

With inefficient workflows, your staff has to fill the gaps between systems. This often means their day-to-day responsibilities focus less on patients and more on piecing reports together between disparate platforms. This can mean:

• Moving between systems, as data does not intuitively flow from your scheduling platform to your texting one, leading to missed appointments.
• Each platform requires its own password, which can confuse and frustrate staff as they jump between them.
• Multiple workflows that can run without interacting with each other, leading to duplicated data, inaccurate patient records, and more.

Manual Data Entry

Tied to the frustration of platforms that don’t work well together is the inevitable uptick in manual data entry. If your back office systems aren’t communicating, it’s up to your staff to fill in the blanks. This means they may find themselves facing:

• Repetitive tasks like moving clinical photos from one platform to another to ensure comprehensive records of pre- and post-op documentation.
• Duplicate work, like entering PHI across each system.

Chasing Missing Information

While working with disconnected systems, your staff may also find themselves playing detective. They’ll be on the hunt for missing information that appears on one platform but not in another. This isn’t just time-consuming but also increases the risk of inaccurate patient records, missed vendor payments, and more.

• If your systems aren’t communicating correctly, some, if not all, of your patient files may be incomplete. This means staff have to spend time manually checking and correcting them.
• With multiple platforms responsible for keeping your back office up and running, it’s sometimes difficult to determine which vendor is on the hook for support or incident management.

Fixing System Errors

System errors can come in a variety of forms. All of them eat away at staff productivity and morale, draining energy and potential revenue from your practice. This can look like:

• Claims issues that result in incorrect payments to or from patients’ insurance companies.
• Communication failures not only between back-office systems but also between these platforms and your patients. Appointments are missed, waiting times increase, and the overall patient experience suffers.
• Data mismatches that leave providers in the lurch, working with inaccurate patient information.

The Business Impact of Burnout

All of these day-to-day frustrations and complications begin to pile up. It’s one thing to have one week that’s full of manual charting and chasing down invoices--it’s another thing entirely to have that consume the majority of your staff’s time and attention, week after week, month after month.

The most common ways your practice can be impacted by staff burnout are:

Higher turnover

For dermatology practices in particular, burnout has a huge influence on staff turnover rates. The Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) reports that burnout drives frontline medical assistants and desk staff to turnover rates between 33-40% annually.

This high turnover rate leads to:

• Cash flow disruptions: Turnover in billing and front-desk roles lead to costly errors, delayed claims, and credentialing friction.
• Increased onboarding costs: National healthcare data reveals that staff burnout and turnover costs organizations anywhere between $4100-10,200 per person in annual operational drag.
• Decreased patient care quality: Staff shortages force remaining team members to rush, leading to lower patient satisfaction rates and an increased risk of medical errors.

Longer onboarding

Each new and existing staff member has to be trained on each back office system. If your practice is operating with the average 5-10 platforms, this means hours of onboarding, certifying, and continuous training to keep staff up to date.

Which means that even bringing in a new hire to help alleviate the strain of understaffing isn’t an instant fix; they’ll need time to learn how to manage your current tech mix.

Lower productivity

Decreased productivity is one of the hallmark signs of burnout. This can look like increased mistakes like scheduling errors, wrong data entry, and delayed insurance verifications. Tasks like instrument sterilization, pathology tracking, and room turnover take noticeably longer.

Pairing this with a reduced staff means your practice is running poorly--which can impact its reputation, patient experience, and overall financial security.

How a Connected, Cohesive Back Office Reduces Burnout

What can your practice do to help reduce staff burnout? One of the most common solutions is tech consolidation, which reduces the number of systems your practice needs to operate.

Let’s take a look at how a connected, cohesive back office can help drive down burnout rates.

Fewer systems

With fewer systems to learn and manage, your staff has more time to focus on patient support and care. This reduction in platform sprawl also helps promote unified data, reducing the risk of compromised PHI and exhausted staff members who have to manually move information between systems.

Better visibility

A unified or all-in-one solution also means your staff has better visibility into everything happening across your practice. This includes scheduling, billing, payments, provider availability, patient preferences, and more. Say goodbye to guesswork and hand-built reports by relying on a system that works with your staff and practice, not against them.

More predictable workdays

Uncertainty is a huge driving force behind staff burnout in healthcare. With mismatched systems, it’s likely your staff have been experiencing these sensations for a while--why are our claims routinely denied? Where is this patient’s missing exam results? Why am I spending 2 hours a day managing patient payment preferences instead of providing provider support?

With an all-in-one solution, your back office runs smoothly, eliminating uncertainty and allowing your staff to enjoy more predictable workdays--and therefore kicking one of the biggest causes of burnout to the curb.

If you’d like to learn more about how a disconnect tech set is driving burnout in your practice, check out our in-depth guide here.