Anyone who works in a “helping profession” can experience compassion fatigue — physicians, nurses, psychologists, social workers, even first responders. Every specialty is vulnerable, from palliative care to emergency medicine to maternal-fetal medicine.

This physical and emotional exhaustion, however, is not limited to professionals who provide care in person. Individuals who provide care to patients remotely, using technology, are still vulnerable to compassion fatigue. Experts have dubbed this extension or evolution of compassion fatigue “digital compassion fatigue.”

“There’s no reason to think that compassion fatigue is limited to in-person care,” said Rachel Hoopsick, PhD, MS, MPH, MCHES, assistant professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who has co-authored several studies on mental health, moral injury, and compassion fatigue in healthcare workers.

What Is Digital Compassion Fatigue?

Compassion fatigue is a type of secondary trauma that occurs when a provider experiences distress from their ongoing role in taking care of patients who are suffering. They become emotionally and physically exhausted. They feel numb or detached, with a diminished sense of empathy.

“If you’re burned out and exhausted, one of the first things to go is compassion,” said Sharona Hoffman, JD, Edgar A. Hahn Professor of Law, professor of bioethics, and co-director of Law-Medicine Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Digital compassion fatigue has emerged as a variation on compassion fatigue.

A 2025 study in the journal Applied Clinical Informatics described digital compassion fatigue as “a phenomenon proposed to be characterized by the negative psychological and emotional impact of caring for patients remotely through the use of technology.”

According to Lauren Muñoz, PhD, RN, research scientist at the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, healthcare professionals are not immune to compassion fatigue just because they’re using technology.

“The reason is that compassion fatigue is about taking on the burden of caring for others,” she said. “And that happens not just in person. It can happen over the phone, and it can certainly happen over a video platform, like telehealth typically uses.”

Quirks of Technology

Technology also brings along its own quirks that can be uniquely problematic.

“You might feel even more burned out if you’re just required to look at people by Zoom, time and time and time again,” Hoffman said.

This phenomenon even has its own name, coined during the pandemic: Zoom fatigue. People who spend extended amounts of time using videoconferencing platforms may feel anxious before a call and exhausted afterward. The Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue Scale was even developed to assess the impact.

Videoconferences also offer fewer nonverbal cues, which can be frustrating to some clinicians when assessing or interacting with patients.

“There are so many things that a provider bases their differential diagnosis or their treatment plan on, like body language,” Muñoz said. “In a telehealth appointment, you can’t see if a patient’s legs are bouncing up and down because they’re nervous or if their hands are clenched because they’re angry or in pain…it’s just hard to tell sometimes. And that can create some doubt or uncertainty for the provider.”

“You have a very restricted view,” added Hoffman.

Meanwhile, distractions such as alerts and notifications that pop up on the screen can be more than just annoying interruptions. “Those things inhibit your rapport that you can build with a patient,” Muñoz said.

Another factor that can contribute to digital compassion fatigue is the potential blurring of the boundary between professional and private life that can accompany working at home. Those blurred lines may lead clinicians to embrace behaviors such as starting work earlier in the day, working later, shouldering a higher caseload, and finding it hard to transition out of work, said Kerry Schwanz, PhD, professor of psychology at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, whose research focuses include compassion fatigue.

Working remotely like this can blur the lines between home and work life as well. “You feel like you’re always on and you can’t get away,” Munoz said. You can’t mentally get away. And we all need to have a break. Our brains have to rest.”

Providers who work remotely and provide care via telehealth may also feel isolated, a risk factor for depressive symptoms. They may not have the opportunity to debrief with colleagues — or for colleagues to notice signs of burnout or compassion fatigue developing in them, Schwanz said.

Making Plans to Address Digital Compassion Fatigue

The risks of letting compassion fatigue go unaddressed are dire. According to a 2025 study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research co-authored by Hoopsick, higher levels of compassion fatigue are linked to higher rates of suicidality in healthcare workers.

Schwanz pointed out that when compassion fatigue leads to burnout, the next step is often turnover.

“We’re going lose them,” she said. “We’re going to lose really good people that we have in all these professions because the things that make people really good helpers…can lead them so quickly to experience the burnout and secondary trauma experience and lead them to leave the profession.”

Muñoz added it seems like it’s the providers who care the most who seem to be most affected by compassion fatigue.

“And patients want that kind of provider,” Muñoz said. “Those are the very providers that we’ve got to protect because they’re giving the care that patients want to receive.”

While telemedicine usage may have peaked during the pandemic, telehealth is not going to go away, Hoopsick said. In the wake of the pandemic, telehealth use has declined somewhat but still remains what one research team called “an integral part of healthcare delivery.” In fact, the results of a new study in Health Affairs Scholar suggest that telehealth visits seemed to have served as a substitute for in-person visits in the Medicare fee-for-service population.

As a result, digital compassion fatigue must also specifically be addressed. Instead of only focusing on physical hazards, proactive leaders of healthcare systems should also prioritize employees’ mental health and safety.

“If we want sustainable healthcare, including telehealth, we have to design systems that care for the people who are doing the caring,” Hoopsick said. “It can’t just be about the patients. It also needs to be about the people working in that system.”

Healthcare organizations could offer training to managers and supervisors to address compassion fatigue and digital compassion fatigue, which could include signs to watch out for and how to implement plans to address it, said Tamara Hryshchuk, DNP, RNC-NIC, clinical assistant professor of nursing and director of the Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing program at the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“We could be better at that,” she said.

Individuals can also pay attention to their own risk of developing digital compassion fatigue and take steps to mitigate it, Schwanz said. She recommends setting clear work hours, scheduling small breaks throughout the day and creating a definite transition from work to home at the end of a shift, as well as prioritizing self-care.

“Interestingly, people who are perfectionistic tend to be more at risk for compassion fatigue, and I could see that being more magnified working from home,” she said.