Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Oct 1, 2024
Date Accepted: Feb 17, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Impact of Smartphone-Based Messaging on Nurses and Interns at an Academic Medical Center
ABSTRACT
Background:
The increasing use of secure messaging in medical centers has led to concerns about alert fatigue and the impact on clinician burnout. This study is aimed at characterizing messaging patterns between nurses and medicine interns to inform interventions to mitigate these issues.
Objective:
The aim is to analyze messaging patterns between nurses and medicine interns at an academic medical center using the TigerConnect platform, with the goal of informing interventions to reduce alert fatigue and improve clinician well-being.
Methods:
This observational study analyzed TigerConnect transactions between 25 internal medicine interns and 96 nurses over five months. Data on message volume, patterns, and response times were collected and analyzed using Python and R.
Results:
Interns exchanged significantly more messages per day with nurses than vice versa. The peak message volume occurred in the mid-morning and late evening. Although both groups responded to messages quickly, interns had a higher burden of messages.
Conclusions:
The findings highlight the need for interventions to reduce the burden of messages on clinicians. Strategies like geographic cohorting of patients, scheduled quiet hours, and proactive face-to-face check-ins may help reduce alert fatigue and improve clinician well-being. Future research should explore the efficacy of these interventions in decreasing burnout and improving communication outcomes.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.