Years after the Covid-19 pandemic sparked a renewed national conversation about healthcare workers’ mental health, many nurses say the industry is still not doing enough to support frontline staff. That’s the takeaway from Trusted Health’s 2023 Frontline Nurse Mental Health and Well-being Survey released Wednesday.

More than 60% of 1,900+ nurses, which the health staffing startup polled via email in April 2023, said they felt the healthcare industry does not prioritize their mental health and well-being. Meanwhile, about a third (32%) of respondents said they felt the industry prioritizes their mental health but lacks adequate measures to support it.

Just 5% said they feel their mental health is prioritized and properly supported in the industry.

More than half (55%) of nurses surveyed also expressed some level of dissatisfaction with the level of support provided by their hospital or health organization, and 70% of respondents said their direct manager has never asked about their mental health.

Those attitudes are largely consistent with previous Trusted surveys. For four straight years, about 95% of nurses said they felt their mental health was either not a priority for the healthcare industry or that there weren’t enough measures to support it, even if it was a priority.

“The overall sentiment of nurses is that the benefits being offered by a lot of hospitals are really just sort of lip service and aren’t actually the kind of meaningful changes that would make nursing a more sustainable career,” Trusted Health Chief Nursing Officer Dani Bowie told Healthcare Brew.

Still, Trusted’s report included some encouraging findings.

The percentage of nurses who said they plan to leave their jobs this year was down slightly from 2022—54% versus 58%, respectively.

Keep reading here.—SY

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Shannon at shannon@morningbrew.com. For completely confidential conversations, ask Shannon for her number on Signal.

Makes patients say “yay!” Remixed clichés aside, delivering a top-notch patient experience through social media interactions and DMs is crucial to any endeavor in the healthcare industry—especially if you’re an innovative provider.

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As healthcare has become digitized over the last fiveish decades, a top challenge for the industry has been figuring out how to make patient data interoperable—i.e., making it possible to share patient information easily between different doctors and computer systems to improve care and reduce unnecessary spending.

The industry has made “huge progress” in the last decade, Steven Lane, chief medical officer at interoperability startup Health Gorilla, told Healthcare Brew. But, he added, there are still “tremendous inefficiencies” when sharing information across the different facets of healthcare, making interoperability a field ripe for startups.

“There are many workflows that are still manual, still using fax,” Lane said. “Anybody who can beat out even a little bit of inefficiency […] has the opportunity to add value and take some of that profit by lowering the costs for the other participants.”

Funding for US-based health data infrastructure and interoperability startups totaled $2.2 billion in 2021, nearly triple the $736 million raised in 2020, according to data from digital health strategy group and venture fund Rock Health. Since then, funding has somewhat cooled, but startups were still able to raise $883 million in 2022 (a nearly 20% increase over 2020) and $265 million in the first quarter of 2023.

Why now? Keep reading here.—MA

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Maia at anderson@morningbrew.com. For completely confidential conversations, ask Maia for her number on Signal.

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: Most people don’t know how to appeal a rejected claim for their health insurance, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey. (the New York Times)

Quote: “The main message here is that we vastly underestimate the prevalence of obesity using BMI, and there are many people with normal BMI who still have obesity.”—Aayush Visaria, an internal medicine resident at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, on a study he led on the controversial metric (NBC News)

Read: The toilet plunger has a fascinating history in the process of improving CPR. (the New York Times)

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