Collecting User Experience Data from Clinicians Without Increasing Burnout: Lessons Learned from the Department of Veterans Affairs

Many organizations, including health care systems, offer employee satisfaction and experience surveys. We examine what the literature says in response to the question, “How do health care organizations balance user experience (UX) measurement with knowledge that such collection processes might contribute to participant burnout?” and discuss how the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) applied the results for our recurring measurement. We report the outcome of our evidence synthesis to describe how VA used the results to balance the collection of satisfaction and experience data with the need to minimize excessive clinician tasks. Based on the evidence synthesis, input from VA leadership and feedback from sites transitioning to a new electronic health record (EHR), we developed an enterprise-wide experience evaluation strategy. The strategy has four components: (1) Coordination with project teams to include questions relevant to their efforts; (2) Development of a dashboard, making survey results available to anyone needing data; (3) Proposal of a randomized sampling approach for future surveys; (4) A pilot project to explore correlation between survey results and EHR use metrics. Our approach serves as a model for human factors practitioners and other professionals interested in collecting clinician satisfaction and experience metrics while minimizing perceived impact on workload.