EHRs and EMRs have been a part of the medical world since the 1960s and adoption was eventually incentivized by the government in 2009. The goal was and still is to improve data accuracy, support provider decision-making, and empower clinicians with information to improve continuity of care. Good intentions, but many provider organizations and clinicians will express frustration if asked if they have realized the full value of their EHR.
One complaint has been that the EHR can impact the physician-patient relationship when providers end up having to spend more with their computers rather than spending even more time on patients at the point of care. The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reported in 2019 that healthcare providers spend 50% of their days on their computers, one of the primary causes of physician burnout. Even more shocking is a 2013 study that found 40% of a typical 10-hour emergency room shift was spent on data entry and 4,000 mouse clicks in the EHR.
Whether providers are inputting data into the EHR or trying to find data-driven insights from external healthcare analytics software to inform their decisions or aid in proper coding, clinicians are exhausted. Physician burnout is a real problem, and so is suboptimal patient care, proper reimbursements, and the return on investment on the EHR and third-party applications. Fortunately, technology is catching up, and provider organizations and physicians can finally reap the intended EHR benefits, thanks to an EHR decision workflow.
The Role of Interoperability in Healthcare - and Why It’s Not Enough
Interoperability is the capability of a product or system to interact and function with others. A critical component of an EHR that aims to consolidate disparate data into a single system. In healthcare, interoperability has been almost exclusively focused on reading and writing data to the EHR; however, in all other industries, it is much more than that, and it’s time healthcare expands its definition to include workflow.
The EHR is about driving informed decisions, but the existing EHR workflow for utilizing existing third-party solutions to improve coding, documentation and care is not ideal. Third-party data and recommendations aren’t always easy to access and use while working within the EHR.
If They Can’t Easily Find It, They Won’t Use It
Clinicians spend too much time and effort trying to access and use the insights and recommendations that could improve patient care or reimbursement, often deterring them from even trying. Some of the current EHR workflows require them to navigate outside of the EHR to external vendor websites, log in and search for a patient, close gaps in the website, and then toggle back into the EHR and manually close the gap in the EHR. Other workflows are based on alerts and lead to “alert fatigue” from the overwhelming number of alerts coming from the EHR.
Errors, missed care opportunities, wrong codes, and time requirements result in decreased patient care, physician burnout and wasted spend. A recent Wakefield Research survey for Insiteflow of 250 U.S. clinicians uncovered an astounding 98% of clinicians reported they could provide better patient care and get timely reimbursement if patient-specific insights were easier to access and use. Sadly, 94% of clinicians surveyed say their patients have been impacted by these types of insights not being easy enough to access and use while working in their EHR.
As if the 85% of clinicians reporting that trying to access patient-specific insights in external tools contributes to their fatigue and feeling burned out wasn’t bad enough, all of these issues also have a direct impact on a hospital’s bottom line. The time physicians spend dealing with bill-related issues such as coding errors has a cost - $68,000 per clinician. When provider organizations invest in external, third-party vendor solutions that aren’t used, those investments are a complete loss.