Frustration With Technology and its Relation to Emotional Exhaustion Among Health Care Workers: Cross-sectional Observational Study.

BACKGROUND: New technology adoption is common in health care, but it may elicit frustration if end users are not sufficiently considered in their design or trained in their use. These frustrations may contribute to burnout.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to evaluate and quantify health care workers' frustration with technology and its relationship with emotional exhaustion, after controlling for measures of work-life integration that may indicate excessive job demands.

METHODS: This was a cross-sectional, observational study of health care workers across 31 Michigan hospitals. We used the Safety, Communication, Operational Reliability, and Engagement (SCORE) survey to measure work-life integration and emotional exhaustion among the survey respondents. We used mixed-effects hierarchical linear regression to evaluate the relationship among frustration with technology, other components of work-life integration, and emotional exhaustion, with adjustment for unit and health care worker characteristics.

RESULTS: Of 15,505 respondents, 5065 (32.7%) reported that they experienced frustration with technology on at least 3-5 days per week. Frustration with technology was associated with higher scores for the composite Emotional Exhaustion scale (r=0.35, P