An Organizational Routines Theory of Employee Well-Being: Explaining the Love-Hate Relationship Between Electronic Health Records and Clinicians
Authors: Srivastava, Ankita; Ayyalasomayajula, Surya; Bao, Chenzhang; Ayabakan, Sezgin; Delen, Dursun
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2025)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00940
<jats:p>We study the problem of clinician well-being, through the lens of burnout, using an alternate source of data—a large, unstructured, publicly available dataset comprising 55,441 reviews written by clinicians on Glassdoor.com from 2012 to 2020. First, we employed topic mining and qualitative coding methods to identify contributing factors to clinician well-being and drew comparisons with electronic health records (EHR), a well-studied yet controversial factor in clinician burnout. Surprisingly, EHR- or IT-related keywords were not prominent in the clinicians’ discourse. Instead, routine operations emerged as the most frequently mentioned topic in the pros and cons sections of the reviews. Since routine operational issues are influenced by IT use, we leveraged organizational routines theory and application integration theory to propose a midrange “routines theory of employee well-being” that explains how managing organizational routines through IS can help improve clinician well-being. We tested the proposed theory using econometric models and found that integrating workflow applications significantly enhanced clinician well-being. In contrast, integrating documentation appli…