Designing and evaluating a burnout reduction application for healthcare providers

Healthcare workers' jobs are directly connected to the health and survival of patients. As a result, job burnout can jeopardize employees and patient’s physical and mental health. Therefore, mitigating job burnout increases job satisfaction, enhances care quality, and improves patient safety. This study aimed to develop and evaluate an application to reduce job burnout for healthcare providers. This study conducted a systematic review to identify the application’s educational content and necessary features. Based on these findings the initial application model was designed and the final model was developed by making further adjustments based on interviews with healthcare professionals and research team members. The conceptual and actual models of the application were developed in web-based and mobile forms, and the application was evaluated by five medical informatics experts using heuristic evaluation. The literature review yielded 24 relevant studies. The application's content and data set extracted from these studies comprised nine data elements that were classified into three main sections. The first section of the application was designed to evaluate job burnout; the second section was intended to provide information regarding burnout, and the third section aimed to alleviate job burnout. The application heuristic evaluation of the application resulted in the detection of 26 usability issues with an average severity rating of 1.8 ± 0.56. The majority of these issues violated the principle of aesthetic design. The application developed in this study enables healthcare professionals to understand the concept of burnout and its enhancing and diminishing factors, as well as the consequences involved. The application also offers tactics to mitigate burnout. The result of the usability evaluation demonstrated that the application is user-friendly. The model utilized to develop this software can be used while developing other health-related applications.