Preventing burnout with ePortfolio

Michelle Schmude, EdD

Tanja Adonizio, MD

“To promote burnout among physicians, it is only necessary to subvert their professional and personal priorities, so that they spend all their time on little things and suffer continually from a growing sense that they are neglecting the ones that really matter.”

–The Atlantic magazine paraphrasing Sir William Osler, one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. (“The Root of Physician Burnout” by Richard Gunderman, The Atlantic, Aug. 27, 2012)

“Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice.”

–“For the Young Doctor About to Burn Out” by Richard Gunderman, The Atlantic, Feb. 21, 2014

At Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, students learn about external tools like healthy eating and exercise to help combat stress. More importantly, however, carefully crafted components of the curriculum are designed to build and strengthen students’ internal resources — and none is more important than professional identity formation, or simply “professionalism.”

Numerous studies have demonstrated that professionalism not only ensures patient safety but is also key to preventing physician burnout. As a way to ensure that students are gaining competence in professionalism, Tanja Adonizio, MD, associate dean for Student Affairs and assistant professor of medicine and Michelle Schmude, EdD, associate dean for Admissions, Enrollment Management and Financial Aid and associate professor, developed the ePortfolio, first introduced to the Class of 2021.

The ePortfolio digitally collects students’ reflections and provides tools to aid students in self-directed learning. It logs periodic assessments of each student from faculty, peers and advisors that provides a “360-degree view” of the student and their progress from a variety of perspectives. The ePortfolio also uses leading measures of hard-todefine qualities like emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and an individual’s sense of personal accomplishment.

The student and advisor will be able to use this to establish a baseline for each student’s attitudes and track variations over time. “The purpose of ePortfolio is to enable students to reflect, to gain self-awareness and to continually ask themselves what it means to be a doctor,” Dr. Adonizio said. In short, ePortfolio will create a narrative of a student’s journey to professional identity and to the sense of purpose that will illuminate and sustain them throughout their future careers.