The Health Care Metaverse Can Decrease Burnout

Health care can be a stressful industry. Burnout is high among doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, which can stand in the way of getting everyone the help they need.

However, there may be a solution from an unexpected place — the metaverse.

You’ve probably heard of the metaverse in terms of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and its efforts to create an immersive, virtual reality (VR)-centered social platform.

The metaverse goes far beyond social media, though.

Interconnected virtual worlds can help businesses work together across borders, expand remote work, and, yes, decrease healthcare burnout.

You’ll find stress and exhaustion in virtually every industry, but the medical field experiences it more than most. In 2021, 62.8% of physicians in the U.S. experienced at least one instance of burnout.

Similarly, just 30.2% were satisfied with their work-life balance, and more than half reported symptoms of depression.

The industry has always involved high levels of stress, but the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed things to extremes.

Many medical professionals felt overwhelmed in the face of dramatically rising caseloads, leading to more exhaustion and turnover.

As more people leave the field, the workload for those left increases, leading to a vicious cycle of stress and employee churn.

When lots of people move in and out of the industry, and workloads are high, it’s hard to remain focused and on top of your work. As a result, these high burnout levels have a direct impact on public health.

Fewer workers and more workplace distractions mean it’s harder to respond to everyone’s medical needs quickly.

Healthcare burnout is clearly a big issue, so solving it will likely take a lot of changes. The metaverse could be one of those needed adjustments.

Now that some medical systems are already implementing metaverse clinics, the benefits of the technology are becoming increasingly clear.

One of the biggest advantages of the metaverse in decreasing burnout is that it provides an escape from reality.

Medical professionals can use VR platforms when they’re on break or away from work to escape to an immersive, more calming virtual environment.

Studies have found that just one VR meditation session can decrease hospital staff’s blood pressure and leave them feeling relaxed.

After a month of taking these metaverse breaks, study participants saw significant improvements in both blood pressure and heart rates.

These relaxing metaverse escapes could help break up the day-to-day stress of working in this high-pressure field.

Doing so in the middle of the workday could ensure they keep motivated and perform their best work across their whole shift.

The metaverse could also help tackle burnout by improving hospitals’ employee training systems.

Those two things may not seem connected at first, but studies show that if workers know how to manage their work better, they experience less stress.

Dealing with electronic health records (EHRs) is a common source of stress, often because it takes doctors a lot of time.

A stunning 43% of surveyed physicians take six or more hours managing EHRs after hours, making them twice as likely to report feeling burnt out.

Because the metaverse can make training more engaging — and, therefore, helpful — it can shorten that after-hours work.

The metaverse offers an exciting, immersive environment to train in. As a result, doctors and nurses may find training in the metaverse more engaging, which improves knowledge retention.

Better training will result in higher efficiency and less confusion, letting these professionals accomplish more in their normal schedules to maintain a healthier work-life balance.

Similarly, the healthcare metaverse would make the medical field more efficient overall. On top of hospital employees having better training, they could collaborate with remote colleagues easier. 

Having real-time conversations and data-sharing with people in entirely different hospitals would let medical workers get all the information they need in less time.

They could then spend more time delivering care to patients.

More time with patients means fewer employees can help more people in a day, in turn, reducing overall workloads and backlogs.

As hospitals reduce the burden on each workers’ shoulders, they’d become less stressful places to work.

High workloads are the most common source of workplace stress, so this increased productivity could have a dramatic impact on burnout.

As helpful as the metaverse can be, it has some unique downsides, too. Most notably, because this technology is so new, there aren’t many off-the-shelf metaverse platforms available right now.

Implementing it can also be expensive and complicated.

VR may also raise some mental health concerns. Despite its usefulness as a de-stressor, VR can leave users with feelings of isolation and detachment from reality — a phenomenon called depersonalization.

You’ll see the same thing in conventional gaming, but VR users experience significantly stronger depersonalization than PC gamers.

In light of these challenges, hospitals should approach the metaverse carefully. Some may have to wait for the technology to develop some more before it’s a viable solution.

All should consider how to limit it and balance it with in-person care to avoid its negative effects on users’ mental health.

The healthcare metaverse is a new but already promising field. As this technology advances, it could be an important piece of the puzzle in dealing with burnout in the medical field.

The metaverse alone won’t be enough to address the growing burnout issue in this industry. That said, it has significant potential as part of a larger movement to make things better.

Uncertainty still abounds, but early signs are promising.