Tag: EHR

Optimizing EHR to Reduce Burnout? It’s Worth A Shot.

There is no one solution to fix physician burnout, considering it is a multifaceted issue, but optimizing EHR certainly can’t hurt.

Burnout, as we’ve reported over and over and over, is a pervasive problem impacting the physician workforce in the United States. There is no one solution to fix it, considering it is a multifaceted issue. However, the AMA has one suggestion—streamlining EHR.

EHR, which is often labeled as a factor of physician burnout, hasn’t exactly lived up to the hype surrounding it when it was introduced. It was supposed to be the wave of the future, a way to improve the healthcare experience for not only patients, but staff, as well. It’s done nearly the opposite, becoming a time-consuming burden for physicians and leading to breaches of patient data in a way that was never really possible with paper health records. However, it is seemingly here to stay, so optimizing it only makes sense, and one practice in Massachusetts may have cracked the code on how to do this.

In 2016, Reliant Medical Group, a 500-provider multispecialty practice in Massachusetts, ranked in the 97th percentile nationally for EHR usability. The system they have developed has reportedly resulted in a 25% reduction in physician in-basket message volume over an 18-month period.

How did they do it?

Establish A Comprehensive EHR Team

Reliant developed a team, which is comprised of five physicians, one physician assistant, and a nurse, who work in concert with 12 members of the IT division. This team meets weekly to identify ways to improve efficiency, and then the programmers go to work to implement changes.

Automate When Possible

Reliant created a system that can automatically gather and share patient information from multiple sources, such as affiliated hospitals and health plans. This has helped them to cut down on time-consuming tasks, such as calling around to other organizations for information.

Delegate Where Appropriate

A physician’s overflowing inbox is another source of burnout. Tweaking EHR so that other members of the staff, such as medical assistants, can gather and receive information without producing a message for the physician helps alleviate this. Within Reliant’s practice, only laboratory results are sent to the primary care physician’s inbox for review, while routine consultation notes are no longer delivered directly to the physician.

Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

Is the Professionalism of Doctors, Nurses Being Exploited?

Doctors, nurses often do what’s right by their patients, even if it comes at a high personal cost. Is their professional nature being exploited by those in charge?

As the corporatization of healthcare continues at a rapid pace and staffing shortages march on, are the professionals at the heart of the health industry being exploited for their work ethic and professionalism? An op-ed published in The New York Times by Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, postulates this to be true.

The op-ed, which points out that doctors and nurses often do the right thing for their patients, even though it frequently comes at a high personal cost, casts a scathing light on higher-ups who manipulate this to their favor. “If doctors and nurses clocked out when their paid hours were finished, the effect on patients would be calamitous. Doctors and nurses know this, which is why they don’t shirk. The system knows it, too, and takes advantage,” Dr. Ofri says in the piece.

Dr. Ofri goes on to point a blaming finger at time-consuming EHR, calling it the “biggest culprit of the mushrooming workload” that has been thrust upon medical professionals in recent years.

“For most doctors and nurses, it is unthinkable to walk away without completing your work because dropping the ball could endanger your patients,” Dr. Ofri states, which is the conundrum at the heart of the op-ed. Real lives are at stake, but not just those of the patients—the lives and livelihoods of those who care for them, too.

Read the op-ed in its entirety here, and tell us if you agree or disagree in the comments below.

Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

Physicians Enthusiastic about How AI Can Help Them with Digital Diagnostics

AI has the ability to change the landscape of modern medicine, and take some of the burden off of physicians, if used correctly.

by Alex Tate

AI can improve all aspects related to diagnostics of a practice easily. They can improve and assess results more practically and feasibly for practices and track disease and treatment response more accurately. This will assess and measure patient outcomes, and can free up doctor’s time and help with burnout. If the change is resisted it is because roles of clinicians will change.

AI can not only further digital diagnostics, but create new workflows that will change the current pace of diagnoses, prognoses and medical documentation. With accurate results, the less room for human error, and churning out a faster diagnosis can mean treating patients with care and better facilities. You can imagine why this may be met with enthusiasm for anyone in a white coat.

What will AI do in diagnostics?

  1. Increase lab report results.
  2. Overcome the current shortage of trained lab workers.
  3. Give accurate diagnosis in real time, without having to go through recurrent tests to rule out different diseases, illnesses, and diagnosis.
  4. Catch symptoms faster
  5. Cut down physician’s time spent looking at medical tests, scans, and spend more time treating a patient based on AI diagnosis.

AI is known to make significant contributions in radiology and pathology diagnostics. 75% of physicians are excited about advancements according to a research published in Digital Medicine (A. D. Shihab Sarwar, 2019). AI is beneficial for workflow efficiency and quality assurance in pathology. In the same research many physicians were welcoming towards training and other implications before AI can be used wholly in a practice. Pathology and radiology are image-focused and diagnostic-focused, and constant improvements in the computational algorithms for these specifications have been developed and powered for best outcomes. AI carries the potential to transform the clinical practice of physicians. In Pathology, AI diagnostics may perform image analysis for tissue histology, analysis of molecular outputs and predict the prognosis accurately.

Medical diagnostics are a category of medical tests designed to detect infections, conditions and diseases. AI is playing an integral role in the evolution of the field of medical diagnostics. Pathologists manually go through all blood types for diagnosis. AI in medical diagnostics is still a relatively new approach. Clinicians need convincing about how reliable, sensitive, and integrated it is in diagnostics. Why is that? A lot of reading, rigorous testing, and attention to detail is required in medical diagnostics. A mistake can be fatal. AI applications are created with precise computational algorithms that can effectively produce diagnostics in clinical practices.

Some clinicians are worried about what it means to them if a machine can read blood tests. It is likely to do a lot more. AI using neural networks can train diagnostic machines to understand the image. Pooled data is the way forward. Machine learning ensure that the machine picks up more information through pattern recognition.

AI can cut down time a physician spends on an EHR. Digital diagnostics can increase physician’s “pajama time” (late evening time spent with family or otherwise) if it performs all tasks. It also leads to a standardization in how data is interpreted by monitoring all lab information in real time. How does this do that? According to Mark Benjamin, the CEO of Nuance, the job of AI is not just to transfer voice text into written text, but it should also have the means to decipher text. That is the added advantage of Conversational AI. He explicates the four uses of healthcare industry; an evident improvement in a physicians’ life, enhanced quality of care and a discernibly healthier population, and a diminishing healthcare cost. Without technology (and AI), these goals cannot be actualized.

Physicians’ enthusiasm for improvements in AI functions in healthcare means that all manual readings and errors will visibly decrease. Saving possible time, lab use, money and easing compliance with government regulations is favorable to them. Virtual assistants are no longer a thing seen in Sci-Fi movies either. There are fast advances in AI. Every physician might be able to have their own “Jarvis” like Iron Man. Their job will be to save patients’ lives, like Tony Stark saves the planet. You don’t even have to imagine a “Jarvis” that is yours; the question is when will AI be yours.

Strong AI is still in the experimental stage. Documentation via voice recognition, and conversational AI prevents physician burnout and prevents it from relapsing. Clinical documentation will soon be able to write for itself, and have enough machine learning to predict text, symptoms and even diagnostics intelligently to cut further documentation time and perform data retrieval from EHRs quickly. AI is a workforce productivity tool and should be used as such to reduce time-intensive workflows. AI is also supposed to provide insights through Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics. Machine learning and Deep Learning (a distinct usage of machine learning) are method to achieve Artificial Intelligence.

Currently, physicians spend more time with their EHR charts than with patients. Even AI is no substitute for human touch or eye contact between caregiver and receiver. Medicine is an evidence-based profession and is rigid to change unless it does not see vast improvements in caregiving.

AI improves operations, with automating scheduling and billing. Clinical outcomes and decisions will still lie with the practice managers. Clinicians also like to see evidence before they believe how impactful AI is in their practice without taking away control. The idea for using AI in healthcare has never been to replace doctors, but rather to bring about support to health care delivery.

If AI can assist in diagnostics, robotic assisted surgery is not so far away. AI will be able to perform these tasks and many more with time. The only question is when. mHealth is joining in, and AI researchers say that it is only a matter of time until HQ mobile phone cameras will be able to understand images and send them to a database for further consideration.

Alex Tate is a Healthcare IT Researcher and freelance writer who focus various engaging and informative topics related to the health IT industry. He loves to research and write about topics such as Affordable Care Act, EHR, revenue cycle management, privacy and security of patient health data. You can reach him via email

Find out more about her company here: https://oxfordhousetherapy.com/

Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

Physicians Are Plagued by EHR, but Few Are Asking Them How to Improve It

Despite documentation burden being a leading factor of physician burnout, organizations and EHR vendors are barely asking physicians how to improve.

EHRs are a common pain point for physicians, with multiple studies singling out documentation burden as a leading factor of physician burnout. However, a new survey of U.S. physicians by Deloitte found that only about a third of organizations and EHR vendors sought physician feedback on how to improve EHR processes.

Approximately 624 U.S. primary care and specialty physicians participated in the Deloitte 2018 Survey of U.S. Physicians, and of those respondents, only 34% of surveyed physicians indicated their organization or EHR vendor sought their feedback, though 58% of responding physicians said there is a big opportunity for improvement in clinical documentation, and it was the number one area physicians indicated could be done more efficiently in their day.

51% of physicians who were not asked for feedback said they were unaware of EHR optimization efforts either by their organization or through their EHR vendor.

Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

5 Reasons Why The Modern EHR Must Be Mobile

A customizable, easy-to-use mobile interface can both improve common EHR efficiency issues and open the door to the meaningful use of EHR systems.

from The Doctor Weighs In

Mobile is making headway in bolstering the advanced technology that aids the care continuum for both doctors and patients in the healthcare industry—and the electronic health records (EHR) space is no exception. Smartphones and tablets are on their way to becoming staples in the healthcare ecosystem, allowing patients and their providers easy access to the tools and information systems that streamline their roles, enable information exchange, and improve care delivery. To keep up with this shift in tech, many EHR providers are investing in their mobile capabilities, improving interfaces, and offering Internet-free access to the data and tools that patients and physicians rely on.

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Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

How Tech Can Undo Physician Burnout from EHRs

Solutions should reduce the burden of repetitive data input that now takes place and enable seamless ways for clinicians to talk to each other, experts say.

from HealthcareITNews

The widespread frustration felt by doctors wrangling with kludgy interfaces, interminable sign-ins and so many clicks is well-trodden at this point. Perhaps less understood, however, is how technologies including EHRs can be tuned to make physicians more efficient — and more happy.

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Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

Patient & Professional Perceptions of Electronic Health Records

A new survey reveals that 32% of patients perceive having access to their EHRs is ‘very important’ to them.

from SelectHub

Electronic health records, also known as electronic medical records (EHRs/EMRs), are becoming the standard method of record keeping by medical professionals. According to the CDC, nearly 87 percent of office-based physicians use an EMR/EHR system.Given EHRs are becoming the rule rather than the exception, we surveyed more than 1,000 patients with access to EHRs and over 100 medical professionals who use the system about their opinions on this growing trend in the health care industry. Continue reading to see what we learned.

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Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

Keys to Successful EHR Selection in a Value-Based Care System

Providers need to find health IT companies offering a high degree of usability and integrated solutions during the EHR selection process for value-based care success.

from EHR Intelligence

While most providers understand the goals of the value-based care system, many still approach EHR selection through a volume-based lens. According to a post by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO John Halamka, MD, health IT vendors are partially to blame. When advertising a system’s capabilities, health IT companies should begin framing their successes in relation to what their services help hospitals accomplish rather than how popular they are. This is what value-based care was designed to do—push the healthcare industry’s focus away from quantity and toward quality.

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Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

PCPs Spend More than Half of Workdays Interacting with EHRs

A new study of 142 family medicine physicians shows they spend an exorbitant amount of their day on clerical or administrative tasks.

from Health Data Management

Primary care physicians spend an average of nearly six hours—more than half of their workday—performing clerical and administrative tasks in their electronic health record systems. That’s the finding of a retrospective cohort study of 142 family medicine physicians at a large academic healthcare center in southern Wisconsin, conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and the American Medical Association.

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Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

Natural Disasters Make Strong Case for EHRs

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and the devastation they have brought with them, serve as glaring reminders for how beneficial EHRs can be in a crisis. Is your hospital prepared?

Though the implementation of electronic health records has come with its problems and has had its share of critics in our hospitals and health systems, many studies have highlighted their benefits, including improved access to and organization of patient data, providing the ability to make more timely decisions regarding care, improved communication and care coordination, a reduction in clerical tasks, and more.

However, one benefit of EHRs that is often overlooked is how invaluable they can be when disasters strike. In the wake of Hurricane Harvey’s recent devastation of the greater Houston, Texas area and Hurricane Irma’s potentially imminent destruction of Florida, it is certainly a point worth making.

Is your hospital ready to face Mother Nature’s wrath? If not, Primary Protection: Enhancing Health Care Resilience for a Changing Climate, a toolkit from the Department of Health and Human Services, provides an in-depth guide for how to create sustainable and resilient hospitals in the face of climate change and natural disasters.

Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.