clinical workflow

See the following -

EHRs Can’t Keep Up with Healthcare Analytics Abilities, Needs

Jennifer Bresnick | Health IT Analytics | August 17, 2016

The electronic health record simply isn’t evolving quickly enough to keep up with rapid innovations in healthcare big data analytics and the increasingly complex needs of end-users, says an editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) this week. The opinion piece, authored by a trio of physicians and researchers from Stanford University, points out that existing clinical decision support features often border on the useless due to an overwhelming number of low-priority alarms and alerts, inadequate data visualizations, and an inability to capture socioeconomic and behavioral data within the clinical workflow...

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Alert Overload Causing Docs To Miss Abnormal Test Results

Marla Durben Hirsch | FierceEMR | March 5, 2013

Follow up failures continue to occur in outpatient settings even when physicians receive electronic alerts of abnormal test results, according to a new study in JAMA Internal Medicine. Read More »

Better Tech Is Here for Healthcare

Brandt Welker | EMR & HIPAA | September 13, 2017

Better technology is out there serving other industries … and it can be applied in healthcare. Technology should ease administrative loads and put clinicians back in front of patients! I’ve talked about some of this previously and how we keep clinicians involved in our design process. When it came to building an entirely new EHR, the driving force behind our team researching and adopting new technologies was to imagine a clean slate...

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Dangers In Electronic Medical Documentation!

Chris Brown | Medicaltranscriptionsservice.com. | March 4, 2014

Slip-shoddy documentation can lead to disastrous consequences. And more often than not it is hapless patients who pay the price for it. The shocking news of patients dying due to documentation errors, is hitting the headlines more frequently. Though it is easy to lay the blame squarely on EHRs identifying the flaws in the documentation process is even more important. Read More »

EHR Tasks Take Up Half of the Primary Care Physician’s Workday

Erin Dietsche | MedCity News | September 12, 2017

It’s practically become a mantra in healthcare: EHRs take up too much of physicians’ time. But just how much time do doctors spend on EHR-related tasks? A new study out of the University of Wisconsin and the American Medical Association dug deeper. From 2013 to 2016, researchers analyzed 142 family medicine physicians, all of whom used an Epic EHR, at a system in southern Wisconsin. All data was captured via EHR event log data during clinic hours (8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday) and non-clinic hours...

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EHR Usability Gaps -- ONC and AHRQ Identify Serious Shortcomings of Certified EHRs

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act provided providers with a significant financial incentive to increase the adoption and use of EHRs. EHR vendors were required to conduct and report on a summative usability evaluation of their system as part of the Stage 2 Meaningful Use program (The ONC 2014 Edition Certification). However, a recent report funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), identified several “issues” with the certified EHR vendors in the processes, practices and use of standards and best practices with regard to usability and human factors.

Good Ideas From Unexpected Places: Thinking Creatively for Healthcare Innovation

How about this: in Harvard Business Review, two leaders at Johns Hopkins suggested that hospitals could learn something about buying equipment from -- drum roll, please -- the airline industry. You don't often find many people defending airlines these days, much less holding them up as good examples of anything (except, perhaps, about what not to do, what with overbooking, cramped leg space, plenty of add-on fees, and, of course, dragging paying passengers off planes).  That their recommendations make sense probably says more, though, about how poorly health care often does things than how well airlines do...

Guess What: Docs Don't Like EHRs

It's kind of "dog-bites-man" type news, but there is even more evidence that physicians not only don't think EHRs are helping them but actually see them as contributing to burnout. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic found that use of EHRs (or computerized physician order entries -- CPOEs) was associated with lower satisfaction with time spent on clerical tasks, with nearly half of physicians saying the amount of time spent on clerical tasks was unreasonable.  No wonder the AMA CEO recently complained that physicians were turning into the "most expensive data entry force on the face of the planet."

Halamka Says We Can and Must Improve Healthcare Management

As a physician and CIO, I’m quick to spot inefficiencies in healthcare workflow.  More importantly, as the care navigator for my family, I have extensive firsthand experience with patient facing processes. My wife’s cancer treatment, my father’s end of life care, and my own recent primary hypertension diagnosis taught me how we can do better. Last week, when my wife received a rejection in coverage letter from Harvard Pilgrim/Caremark, it highlighted the imperative we have to improve care management workflow in the US. Since completing her estrogen positive, progesterone positive, HER2 negative breast cancer treatment in 2012 (chemotherapy, surgery, radiation), she’s been maintained on depot lupron and tamoxifen to suppress estrogen...

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How disparate EHR systems, lack of interoperability contribute to physician stress, burnout

Jeff Lagasse | Healthcare IT News | July 2, 2018

Physician burnout is an increasingly common issue in healthcare, and there are a lot of factors that can contribute to it. Long hours, paperwork and the burden of administrative tasks all play a part. But electronic medical records can also contribute to burnout, largely because each system is different. With disparate electronic health record systems comes an added hardship for physicians, affecting their work -- and their reimbursement. Compounding the issue is that many physicians are no longer limited to just one facility. Many handle rounds at multiple hospitals and/or practices, and if each has its own EMR system that doesn't necessarily communicate with the others, it can be a growing headache.

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Machine Learning in Healthcare: Part 3 - Time for a Hands-On Test

Every inpatient and outpatient EHR could theoretically be integrated with a machine learning platform to generate predictions, in order to alert clinicians about important events such as sepsis, pulmonary emboli, etc. This approach may become essential when genetic information is also included in the EHR which would mandate more advanced computation. However, using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in every EHR will be a significant undertaking because not only do subject matter experts and data scientists need to create and validate the models, they must be re-tested over time and tested in a variety of patient populations. Models could change over time and might not work well in every healthcare system. Moreover, the predictive performance must be clinically, and not just statistically significant, otherwise, they will be another source of “alert fatigue.”

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Moving Towards Transformational TeleHealth At Intermountain Healthcare

Mark Hagland | Healthcare Informatics | June 1, 2013

Wesley Valdes, D.O., telehealth services director at Intermountain Healthcare, sees the future of telehealth Read More »

Physician Burnout Is A Public Health Crisis: A Message To Our Fellow Health Care CEOs

John Noseworthy, James Madara, Delos Cosgrove, Mitchell Edgeworth, Ed Ellison, Sarah Krevans, Paul Rothman, Kevin Sowers, Steven Strongwater, David Torchiana, and Dean Harrison | Health Affairs Blog | March 28, 2017

The Quadruple Aim recognizes that a healthy, energized, engaged, and resilient physician workforce is essential to achieving national health goals of higher quality, more affordable care and better health for the populations we serve. Yet in a recent study of U.S. physicians, more than half reported experiencing at least one symptom of burnout—a substantial increase over previous years—indicating that burnout among physicians is becoming a national health crisis. Leadership is needed to address the root causes of this problem and reposition the health care workforce for the future. The authors of this paper—the CEOs of our respective institutions—are committing to do just that...

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Physician Feedback Key to EHR Usability Improvements

Sara Heath | EHR Intelligence | August 3, 2016

In order to improve physician EHR use, health IT developers need to take into consideration the needs of end users and practice managers. New research shows that developers can improve EHR usability when they collect user feedback periodically. According to a research team led by Anne Press, MD, this user feedback is important when integrating new specialty functions into an EHR...

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Type & Click Tasks Drain Half the Primary Care Workday

Press Release | American Medical Association | September 11, 2017

Primary care physicians spend more than half of their workday at a computer screen performing data entry and other tasks with electronic medical records (EHRs), according to new research from experts at the University of Wisconsin and the American Medical Association (AMA). Based on data from EHR event logs and confirmed by direct observation data, researchers found that during a typical 11.4-hour workday, primary care physicians spent nearly six hours on data entry and other tasks with EHR systems during and after clinical hours. The study was published today in the Annals of Family Medicine...