A related commentary discusses this research. As the world struggles with how best to reduce burnout, the most common questions from chief executive officers and organizational leaders are: What should we do? What will it cost? How will this affect productivity, quality, and clinician turnover?
Reducing burnout leads to better outcomes for clinicians, but will it do the same for patients? How successful can the profession become at reducing and sustaining burnout at low levels, given that regulations, publicly reported patient outcomes, and complex medical record systems have brought new and enduring challenges to the practice of medicine. New quality improvement studies, including smaller and more-focused but still rigorously performed projects, will help clinicians learn what might work and then allow them to propose the larger funded trials that will test it. More work is needed to understand how to reduce burnout it and what can be expected from doing so.