Introduction
We’re very good at talking about healthcare innovation. Every week brings something new: AI tools, smarter platforms, connected devices, electronic patient records, and ever more data feeding into clinical decisions. The excitement is mostly justified.
However, I wonder whether, in all that enthusiasm for what technology can help with, do we spend enough time thinking about the people who make it work.
Let’s imagine a typical healthcare technology project. Someone is working out what clinicians actually need. Someone else turns that into requirements developers can build from. Another person coordinates the rollout, another checks that the system behaves as it should, and then there are the people who deal with the problems once it goes live. Their work doesn’t stop on the official completion date.
For many of them, a normal day is a jumble of meetings, competing priorities, technical debates and surprises. A task that looked simple at 9am can be a mess by lunchtime. You fix one problem and another turns up.
None of this means they don’t enjoy the work. Most of them chose digital health because they believe technology can improve healthcare. The hard part is keeping that belief alive when pressure becomes the background noise of every working day.
That’s why digital health professional burnout deserves a closer look.
Digital health work is about more than technology
Part of what makes this field so demanding is that you have to understand several different worlds at once.
Developers think about functionality, performance and what’s technically feasible. Clinicians think about patient safety, workflows and the few minutes they have in a consultation. The healthcare organisation is watching budgets, efficiency and deadlines.
Somewhere in the middle are the people trying to make all of that fit together.
I’ve always thought this connecting role is one of the hardest in healthcare technology. Understanding a requirement is one thing. Understanding why it matters to the person who’ll use the system all day is something else entirely.
Take a business analyst who spends hours on what looks like a tiny change to a clinical workflow. On paper it’s a minor tweak. For a clinician working through a busy shift, it can change the whole day.
So this work takes more than technical knowledge. It takes patience, clear communication, good judgement, and a real willingness to see things from a very different point of view. Workloads and project plans don’t always make room for that.
When keeping up becomes exhausting
Healthcare technology moves fast, and artificial intelligence has added a fresh layer of expectation about what professionals should know and deliver.
There’s always another tool to try, another system to learn, another development someone wants in the plan.
Learning is a big part of what makes the job interesting. The trouble starts when it becomes one more responsibility on top of everything else, with nothing taken off the pile.
Imagine you’re supporting a hospital information system while also helping implement a new platform. You’re expected to keep the current system running, attend project meetings, review requirements, support testing and help colleagues cope with the change. Nothing on that list is optional, and when something breaks, people look to you for the fix.
Over time, even capable, committed people start to feel stretched thin.
Then there’s the constant communication. Email, video calls, chat apps and project tools have made collaboration easier, but they’ve also created an overwhelming feeling that you must be reachable at every moment. It’s entirely possible to work eight hours without a single uninterrupted one to think through a hard problem.
We don’t talk enough about what that does to concentration, creativity and the simple pleasure of doing a job well.
The pressure nobody sees
One of the least recognised parts of this work is the responsibility for preventing problems.
When a system works, nobody notices. When it fails, everybody wants to know why.
Think about testing a new healthcare application. A team might spend weeks hunting for issues, checking workflows, reviewing access permissions and confirming that information displays correctly. It’s repetitive, detailed and sometimes maddening. It also matters a great deal.
The same goes for data quality, integration work and user acceptance testing. A problem caught before go-live can save a huge amount of time and disruption later. Yet the people who caught it rarely get credit for what never happened.
There’s a strange imbalance in that. We applaud the launch, but not the people who spent months making sure the launch wouldn’t cause trouble for its users.
When this keeps happening, people start to wonder whether their contribution is valued at all, or whether they’re simply expected to keep solving the next problem.
Burnout rarely comes from one terrible project. It usually builds slowly, from several pressures that carry on for months or years. The World Health Organization describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon linked to chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed, and it points to three dimensions: exhaustion, growing mental distance from the job, and reduced professional efficacy.
That distinction matters. Being tired after a hard week is normal. Feeling steadily more detached from work that used to mean something to you is a sign to take seriously, and it’s one of the clearest markers of digital health professional burnout.
What does wellbeing actually mean here?
It’s easy to tell people to look after themselves. Take breaks, exercise, try mindfulness, protect your work-life balance. All of that can help.
I think we have to look beyond individual coping tricks. If someone is dealing with unrealistic deadlines, vague responsibilities and too little support, a mindfulness app won’t fix the real problem.
A better starting point might be to ask what makes working life feel worthwhile in the first place. Positive psychology has something useful to say about that.
Professor Martin Seligman’s PERMA model names five ingredients of wellbeing: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment. It’s usually discussed in terms of personal wellbeing, but I think it applies just as well to the digital health workplace.
Start with Meaning. Plenty of people in healthcare technology are driven by the sense that their work contributes to something bigger. A good implementation might help clinicians find information faster or cut needless admin, and knowing you helped make that happen is deeply satisfying. But meaning is hard to hold onto when your days are swallowed by administrative pressure, repeated changes and deadlines.
Engagement is similar. People want to use their skills, solve problems and feel involved. If the whole day goes on emails and meetings, there’s little space left for the focus and creativity that make the work rewarding.
Relationships matter too. Digital health projects rarely succeed through one person’s effort. They depend on people working together across disciplines and organisations, and a supportive colleague or a manager who really listens can make a rough patch far easier to get through.
And then accomplishment. We get so fixated on the next milestone that we forget what we’ve already done. Not every win has to be a major launch. Fixing a stubborn system issue, helping a colleague understand a complicated process, or improving one small part of a clinical workflow all count.
PERMA won’t solve burnout, and nobody should pretend it will. What it does is remind us that people need more than a manageable workload. They need connection, purpose, a chance to contribute, and a sense that what they do matters.
A different conversation about healthcare innovation
I think healthcare organisations need to get more comfortable talking about the human cost of digital transformation.
When a technology project is proposed, we look at budgets, resources, risks, schedules and expected benefits. So why is the impact on the people delivering it so often an afterthought?
A few practical questions would help. Does the team have time to manage its existing duties alongside the new project? Are the people involved consulted before decisions are made? Are the deadlines realistic? Is there room for training, testing and reflection? And maybe most important of all, do people feel able to speak up when something isn’t working?
They’re simple questions, but the answers reveal a lot about an organisation’s culture.
Managers also need to accept that wellbeing can’t be handled through the occasional initiative. A wellbeing webinar is nice, but it won’t change much if everyone goes back to an unmanageable workload the next morning. Real change means looking at how work is allocated, how teams communicate, and how much control people have over their own responsibilities.
It’s worth remembering, too, that people feel pressure differently. Two colleagues with the same job description can have very different experiences depending on their responsibilities, personal circumstances, environment and support. A bit more understanding and flexibility goes a long way.
Technology shouldn’t leave its people behind
Healthcare will keep changing. AI will become more embedded in clinical and administrative processes, platforms will keep evolving, and expectations around efficiency will only rise.
I welcome that progress. But I think we need to be careful about how we define success.
A project can land on time and on budget and still leave an exhausted team in its wake. A platform can have brilliant features, yet its long-term future depends on the people who support and improve it.
So tackling digital health professional burnout isn’t just about making the workplace more pleasant. It’s about recognising the link between human wellbeing, professional effectiveness and innovation that lasts.
Maybe it’s time to widen the lens a little. We put enormous effort into making systems more efficient, intelligent and responsive to human needs. We should put the same care into the working environments where those systems are built.
Innovation isn’t only about what we build. It’s also about how we work, how we treat each other, and what we’re prepared to sustain along the way.
And if the point of healthcare technology is to make healthcare more human, then surely the people behind it deserve the same consideration.
References
- World Health Organization. (2019). Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases
- Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Free Press. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Flourish/Martin-E-P-Seligman/9781439190760
- Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2019). Taking action against clinician burnout: A systems approach to professional well-being. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25521