Beyond duty hours: leveraging large-scale paging data to monitor resident workload

Abstract

Monitoring and managing resident workload is a cornerstone of policy in graduate medical education, and the duty hours metric is the backbone of current regulations. While the duty hours metric measures hours worked, it does not capture differences in intensity of work completed during those hours, which may independently contribute to fatigue and burnout. Few such metrics exist. Digital data streams generated during the usual course of hospital operations can serve as a novel source of insight into workload intensity by providing high-resolution, minute-by-minute data at the individual level; however, study and use of these data streams for workload monitoring has been limited to date. Paging data is one such data stream. In this work, we analyze over 500,000 pages—two full years of pages in an academic internal medicine residency program—to characterize paging patterns among housestaff. We demonstrate technical feasibility, validity, and utility of paging burden as a metric to provide insight into resident workload beyond duty hours alone, and illustrate a general framework for evaluation and incorporation of novel digital data streams into resident workload monitoring.