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Continuously delivering the best care when your staff has the right technology at their fingertips is the path for success. However, many providers are struggling with constant technology challenges around the interface, flexibility, workflow, intuitive organization, compliance and regulations, and much more. This struggle has led to high counts of burnout for physicians, nurses, social workers, and anyone tied to this technology. The time a physician spends customizing their workflow to bend to the needs of the technology continuously burdens them with what their true focus should be, the patient!

Don’t fret, there are solutions within reach. We predict that with feature updates like intuitive workflows, your facility will have the power of insights to finally have the full picture of the patient and healthcare history without sacrificing your staff workflow. Before diving into what will remedy the issues around clinician and administrative burnout, we need to first fully understand what issues are causing them to lose focus or check-out.

Staff burdened by technology
Physicians invest a significant amount of time to become an expert at they do. This investment includes several years in school, the financial burden that goes along with that, residency, sometimes a fellowship, board certification, and continuous education to stay continually informed of new protocol, techniques, and medicine. At the end of it all being able to help a patient is what makes it worth it.

While EHR’s have great potential to improve care, it’s no secret that the staff within the health system are bogged down even with this great technology. For each patient visit, a physician must capture far more digital information than ever before, such as a complicated diagnosis that is given a numerical value in order to meet the new fee-for-service payment model of today. This type of administrative based work is what is bogging physicians/staff down and taking their focus away from what is most important, the patient.  Studies show that burnout is coming from providers and physicians spending just as much time in front of a desktop as they do with their patients resulting in rushed visits. Ultimately, physicians are spending at least half of their time entering information into the EHR system after visiting with a patient, which takes them away from the personable side of care leading to damaged physician-to-patient relationships.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to compliance and documentation. The US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is beginning to make strides with its “patients over paperwork” initiative. This specific campaign’s main purpose is about reducing administrative burden. This initiative plans to streamline Medicare’s heavy documentation requirements for reimbursement. In 2019 we see, physicians being able to spend more time with patients versus spending time entering lengthy information into their desktop thanks to this initiative along with technological advances.

What workflow improvements to expect
Often, after a new EHR implementation clinical and provider efficiency and satisfaction suffer. Which makes configuring a strategic and enhanced EHR system the first key step in helping to prevent turnover and burnout. If this isn’t done, then training and adoption of the new software will be extremely time intensive resulting in performance issues and low morale. To ensure end-user satisfaction after a new EHR implementation at a facility, a staff and clinicians’ workflow should be heavily examined before the implementation process even begins.

In addition to ensuring that EHR software is implemented with the staff’s workflow in mind, it is equally important to keep your staff informed with new enhancements to make their day-to-day jobs easier.

New features to expect this year to make you more connected, streamlined, and intuitive are:

  • Unlimited, secure integrations with any Health IT tool
  • Access to complete resident health histories
  • Configurable, intuitive workflows that adapt to your needs
  • Built-in dictation tools that transcribe notes accurately in real-time
  • Intuitive portals that allow users to sign, send, and receive important documents and communications on a single platform

We believe that tech advancements will give providers the necessary tools to engage and re-engage their facilities staff. By focusing on EHR optimization and usability can help to improve clinician interactions and reduce provider burden. Configuring the EHR interface to suite different workflows and needs in the health system gives a great deal of room for effective and improved usability.

Read our recent white paper, The Future of Long-Term Care: Industry Predictions, to learn more about our other four other predictions.