How a Chief Wellbeing Economist is Helping Healthcare Systems Identify Current and Future Financial States with Targeted Action Plans

Dr. Hu is a co-founder and Chief Wellbeing Economist of Atalan, a women-led, mission-oriented startup focused on using machine learning to predict and prevent clinician burnout and turnover. She is also a research fellow at the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School and Research Economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she focuses her research on clinician burnout. Her expertise is in risk science where her work has received media attention from around the world including the World Economic Forum, Sky News, the UN, among others.

 

 

My journey in studying the economics/science of clinician burnout

• Academic background (risk science from Oxford) and post-doc at Harvard. During Covid, received a National Science Foundation funded grant on covid impact on healthcare workers. Talked to 100+ health systems by now and 150+ healthcare leaders across the country

• Decided to move into tackling clinician burnout because physicians and nurses broke down in front of me during interviews and told me situation was dire. Felt compelled to do something because I cannot bear to think about a world in which we have no doctors and nurses. As a patient that’s a really scary thought.

• With a lot of research, I found economics could be the answer. How economics is traumatizing and it can and should be used by clinicians as an empowerment tool to fight for their well being because with economics, we can show the cost of burnout, and also calculate the return on investment of interventions. We can put a dollar amount on all the hard work that our clinicians do and demonstrate why it makes business sense to invest in their wellbeing

• Aspire to be a pioneer of a new field of wellbeing economic

Turning the science into a platform for action planning for health systems

• Founding the company of Atalan

• During research, one of my best friends Tiffany whom I met at Harvard 8 years ago reached out. She was independently working on clinician wellbeing during Covid and we both realized there was a huge need to do something.

• Tiffany is an inspiration, determined, and crazy person. I told her I won’t jump ship until she does. And she did! So I had to jump and we founded the company together.

• Very proud of our work. Now there’s increasing demand on our health sector which is putting pressure on our docs and nurses yet we’re not thinking nearly enough about them. Atalan’s mission is to support our healthcare workers, specifically to support our health systems to measure, benchmark, and mitigate clinician burnout and turnover using data-driven technologies

Exciting things happening next

• National consortium on intervention evidence

• New product launch in Oct