What Clinician Burnout Is Really Costing You
- by Jeff Collins
Key takeaway
- Clinicians spend nearly half their working time in electronic health record (EHR) systems.
- Slow, unreliable system performance create frustration, which can contribute to clinician burnout and turnover.
- Moving from the cloud to dedicated infrastructure can deliver more consistent, reliable performance and reduce user frustration.
When a clinician wants to review an electronic chart between appointments, they expect instant access. They rarely get it, though. Instead, they might wait 10, 15, or more seconds to load each chart from the electronic health record (EHR) system. That delay happens numerous times per day, as clinicians return repeatedly to those electronic records. According to the AMA Journal of Ethics, clinicians spend nearly half their working time in an EHR system.1
Research from KLAS shows that—not surprisingly—many clinicians are frustrated with slow response times from those systems. Approximately 40% of organizations report less than moderate satisfaction with EHR systems in general. And of those organizations, fewer than half of physicians (49%) are satisfied with the response time.2
What causes the frustrating delays? Often, the infrastructure used for the EHR system is at least partly to blame. The existing infrastructure might not be designed to deliver the consistent, reliable performance that clinicians require. While provider organizations explore ways to boost morale among clinicians, they might find that solving infrastructure problems can deliver the greatest impact for reducing clinician frustration and maintaining a high quality of care.
Surveying the Costs of Clinician Burnout
Daily frustrations experienced by physicians, nurses, and staff can contribute to burnout. And that burnout can be very expensive. When burnout leads to resignations, organizations must spend significant time and money recruiting and onboarding new team members. Meanwhile, they face lost productivity and lost revenue while roles sit open.
Clinician burnout also affects patients. They notice when their doctors are distracted, rushed, or frustrated with technology instead of present in the room. When they have a choice, patients are more likely to seek other care providers.
Some organizations attempt to avoid burnout by launching wellness programs for clinicians, redesigning workflows, and experimenting with new staffing models. But these efforts are expensive too, and they won’t completely eliminate the possibility that burned-out clinicians will leave a practice anyway.
Uncovering the Overlooked Variable
Organizations that try to find the root cause of technology frustration often focus on user devices or clinical applications. However, if clinicians experience slow response times across multiple applications, the culprit is likely the infrastructure.
In particular, cloud infrastructure could be the problem. When an EHR, imaging system, or other clinical application runs on shared, multi-tenant cloud infrastructure, its performance is affected by other organizations using the same physical hardware. If another organization that shares your cloud environment is running a backup or another heavy batch process that requires compute, memory, or storage resources, the performance of your clinical application will suffer.
Identifying the cloud infrastructure problem is important, but it’s just the first step. IT teams might observe that application performance has dipped, but they might be unable to do anything about it because they can’t control or optimize the infrastructure that the application is running on. Fixing the performance issue and regaining control often require an infrastructure change.
Delivering Consistent Performance with Dedicated Hardware
For EHR systems, picture archiving and communication system (PACS) applications, telehealth systems, patient portals, and other clinical workloads, dedicated hardware is often a better choice than cloud-based shared infrastructure. With dedicated bare metal hardware, there are no “noisy neighbors” competing for CPU, memory, storage, or network resources. Clinicians gain consistent, predictable performance.
Dedicated hardware also provides greater control over infrastructure than cloud environments. IT teams can optimize environments as needed to further improve response times for users.
At the same time, dedicated hardware can eliminate the highly variable costs of cloud-based infrastructure. Hyperscalers typically charge per-gigabyte data egress fees. Those fees might make sense for workloads with fluctuating demand, but EHR, PACS, and other clinical workloads do not need burst capacity—and healthcare organizations shouldn’t have to pay a premium for elasticity they don’t need. By choosing dedicated infrastructure with flat monthly fees, organizations can maintain a stable operational budget.
Reducing Frustration by Thinking Beyond the Cloud
Changing the infrastructure beneath a clinical app will not instantly solve clinician burnout. Still, moving latency-sensitive applications to dedicated, single-tenant hardware can help reduce user frustration. Dedicated infrastructure removes the performance variability and unpredictable slowdowns that come from shared-resource environments. As a result, clinicians experience more consistent response times, and IT staff members gain the control to optimize the environment and reduce latency further.
FAQ
Q: How does infrastructure contribute to clinician burnout?
A: The performance of clinical applications running on shared, multi-tenant cloud infrastructure can decrease when other organizations on the same physical hardware run heavy workloads. Repeated, unpredictable lag frustrates clinicians and can ultimately contribute to clinician burnout.
Q: What are the problems with using the cloud for clinical systems?
A: Multi-tenant cloud environments can result in unpredictable performance for clinical systems. If another tenant needs more server resources, your system might experience a performance dip. Meanwhile, because IT teams cannot fully control cloud infrastructure, they can’t optimize environments to address performance issues.
Q: Why is dedicated bare metal infrastructure a better fit for EHR and other clinical systems?
A: With dedicated bare metal infrastructure, organizations do not share server resources with other businesses. As a result, they experience more consistent, predictable performance. They also avoid paying a premium for elastic cloud resources that they do not need for their steady-state workloads. Plus, they gain greater control to optimize their environments.
Citations
1 AMA Journal of Ethics, EHRs, iPatients, and Clinician Well-Being, November 2025
2 KLAS Research, Clinician EHR Experience 2026, June 2026
