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Burnout in healthcare is nothing new—but it’s no longer just a clinical issue. Across clinics and healthcare systems, front-desk teams, administrative staff, and access center employees feel pressure like never before. Healthcare staff are expected to juggle a growing number of responsibilities, including fielding calls, chasing faxes, managing cancellations, keeping schedules full, coordinating intake, and more.
Support staff are essential to the delivery of care, but many of them are currently running on empty.
Manual, repetitive work is one of the biggest culprits to staff burnout. Answering the same questions, typing the same information, scanning the same stack of paper every single day—it’s a constant cycle of task switching that burns through time and energy.
Tools that aren’t helpful also are a major contributor to employee burnout. When staff have to jump between platforms, rely on outdated systems, or carry out processes that should be automated, things start to break down. Small inefficiencies accumulate until teams spend hours every week simply navigating their systems.
That kind of friction doesn’t just slow things down—it wears people out.
But the good news is this: burnout doesn’t have to be the norm. The right technology can remove low-value tasks from staff workflows, streamline communication, and provide teams with the space to focus on what truly matters.
Burnout isn’t just about long hours or tight staffing. It’s about the steady drip of tasks that never let up—calls that keep coming, faxes that pile up, appointments that fall through, and systems that expect your staff to do everything at once. It’s the fatigue of constant catch-up, where the real work of supporting patients gets buried under administrative noise.
That’s where technology makes a difference—if it’s the right kind of technology.
A good solution doesn’t just digitize existing processes. It removes the friction. It handles the repetitive work so your staff doesn’t have to. And it fits into the way your team already operates, not the other way around.
Luma’s platform is built with that philosophy at its core. Each tool is designed to reduce low-value work, minimize context switching, and give support staff space to focus on care—not troubleshooting forms or calling down a list.
Here’s how practices are using Luma to protect their teams from burnout—while keeping things running smoothly in the background.
Phone calls are a significant time sink. Staff spend huge chunks of the day answering routine questions, trying to confirm appointments, or handling payments over the phone.
And patients still need support when call volume spikes or the office is closed, which can lead to a morning of staff following up on voicemails or answering portal messages.
Navigator, Luma’s AI-powered concierge, steps in to guide patients through common questions, help them request prescription refills, guide them to self-schedule, and more.
Navigator understands what the patient is asking and offers intelligent, context-aware responses—reducing the number of calls your team needs to return and helping patients stay on track without waiting on hold.
If your staff still spends part of the day printing, sorting, and forwarding faxes manually, that’s a problem worth solving. Luma’s Fax Transform processes paper and electronic faxes automatically—extracting relevant data, classifying documents, and triggering next steps like follow-up scheduling or patient outreach.
It’s hours of back-office work handled in minutes. No more piles of paper. No more missed referrals. Just one more piece of busywork taken off your team’s plate.
Staff shouldn’t be the intermediary for every scheduling request. With the right tools, patients can manage their appointments independently—booking, rescheduling, or canceling without needing to call.
Automated reminders also help reduce no-shows by eliminating the need for manual follow-up. Patients confirm quickly. If they can’t make it, the slot becomes available for someone else who’s on the waitlist.
Self -service is better for patients, better for staff, and keeps your schedules fuller.
If you don’t know where the friction is happening, it’s hard to fix it. Luma’s analytics tools give visibility into staff time and workflow performance—helping you spot patterns, redistribute workload, and allocate resources more effectively.
They give a view into how much time staff and providers spend on communication, documentation, follow-up, and more. With this level of insight, leadership can make smarter decisions about staffing needs and process improvements—before burnout leads to turnover.
When you understand how you’re spending time, you can make adjustments.
Too often, conversations about burnout become massive, unmanageable goals—such as hiring more staff, changing the culture, and rebuilding the system. However, many of the most effective changes are smaller and more tactical.
Automate what you can. Eliminate double-work. Make the technology work harder so your team doesn’t have to.
These aren’t dramatic overhauls. They’re shifts that make the day run smoother, reduce frustration, and give staff the breathing room they’ve been missing. And when support staff feel supported, everything works better—schedules, communication, morale, and retention.
Want to see how these tools come together in real time?
Book a demo and see how Luma helps reduce burnout and build a better experience for patients and staff alike.
Originally published July 13, 2023 on Physicians Practice.
Staffing shortages. For the last few years, this dreaded phrase has become an all-too-familiar reality. The health care staff shortage is projected to continue, and even worsen, until 2025. Meanwhile, a recent Guidehouse Center for Health Insights report states that 95% of health system executives are expecting outpatient volumes to increase this year.
To weather these contrasting trends, establishing omnichannel digital entry points for patients is more crucial than ever to save your team time, resources and energy — as well as to create a coordinated continuum across the patient journey.
But difficult-to-navigate digital tools and the lack of capabilities that patients really need can create a conundrum where both patients and providers want to connect but struggle to do so despite existing patient engagement tools.
It’s more important than ever for practices to be able to effectively leverage their digital patient engagement and communication tools to lessen the burden on staff. Many are still recovering financially from the COVID-19 pandemic on top of current budget constraints and expiring pandemic-era funding, and are struggling to staff enough people to reach patients by phone.
Meanwhile, with limited staff, practices are following up on care missed during the pandemic, competing in a crowded health care market, caring for large numbers of attributed patients and more.
I’ve spoken to representatives of many health systems who are dissatisfied with their digital strategy. They’ve invested in platforms or solutions to make engagement easier for patients but still deal with high call rates, no-shows and low portal adoption. This is the “great patient disconnect,” where both patients and providers are engaged in the health care journey and have digital tools available, but still struggle to connect.
Despite 71% of providers reporting that patient engagement is a high priority at their practice, data from CDW Healthcare notes that just 29% of patients said they would give their providers an A in patient engagement. And while 90% of organizations offer a patient portal, overall the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that only about a third of patients use them.
This disconnect can impact both patients’ care journeys and the effectiveness of the practice. For example, if pre-visit instructions or other important information are primarily accessible in the patient portal, patients without the portal may not be prepared for their appointments or recognize that it’s time for a follow-up visit. Meanwhile, if patients struggle to access the digital tools you provide, more pressure is placed on overburdened staff to reach them via outbound phone calls.
The good news is that patients want to engage with their providers using digital tools. The ubiquity of consumer-focused apps for delivery, transportation, shopping and much more shows that consumers will consistently use a simple and intuitive digital experience. In health care, many of the hurdles that create a patient-provider disconnect are caused not by a lack of engaged patients, but by patients not having access to the tools they need.
Recent KLAS Research data, for example, show that patients often want different tools to connect with their providers, such as self-scheduling and online bill pay, from what their providers are currently offering. Even if a patient accesses your website or patient portal, if they can’t get to an actionable next step, they are likely to call in instead, contributing to the burden on staff. But these patients should not be considered disengaged from their care; in fact, they are very much engaged.
Medical Group Management Association data show that about half of surveyed providers reported an increase in no-show rates between 2021 and 2022, attributed in part to long wait times for an appointment and the cost of appointments. But the 12% of providers who reported their no-show rates were going down cited digital reminders and digital check-in options as some of the reasons for the decline. These responses indicate that accessible digital options can help patients get to your organization and get the care they need.
I believe three factors are key to helping patients better connect with you using digital tools:
Considering these factors can help you identify inefficiencies or pain points that might be quietly contributing to the great patient disconnect and increasing the burden on your staff to bridge that gap manually.
With a focus on solving potential points of disconnection, it’s possible to create patient journeys that are smoother and more streamlined and help you and your patients get more out of digital tools, creating a digital continuum of care.
In a challenging health care environment, it’s critical that we go beyond simply staffing more people to call centers or lamenting low engagement rates or high no-shows. Digital solutions can mitigate these challenges, address barriers to care and streamline staff capacity. To do so effectively, they must be driven by a patient-centered approach that identifies digital dead ends and points of disconnection and creates a unified digital continuum so patients and providers can get to the moment of care more quickly and easily.