Healthcare is full of overwhelming propositions, but often they come from the very systems implemented to improve efficiency. Clinicians and support staff are overloaded with alerting, data entry, an email inbox and an EHR inbox.
Recently, the American Medical Association examined the work of Dr. Jane Fogg, a senior physician advisor to the AMA for professional satisfaction. She has found that there are opportunities for automating and streamlining a data repository like an EHR inbox without disrupting the workflows that clinicians are accustomed to.
The four main areas that Dr. Fogg urges health systems to focus on are elimination, automation, delegation, and collaboration.
In an era of AI harvesting insights from massive datasets and a push to collect as much data as possible, it’s easy to go overboard, but not all data is created equal. In the race for complete documentation, incorrect or duplicate information is often posted and reposted to patient charts, leading to unnecessary error resolution processes. Elimination involves removing low-value information that acts as nothing more than clutter for clinicians.
At Atrius Health, Dr. Fogg was able to reduce the number of specialist chief complaint charts in physician inboxes by 40% by simply not sending them automatically, having specialists only send along what is important. These charts made up more than 10% of inboxes, quickly putting a nice dent in this information overload, cutting out distractions that at best aren’t productive and at worst could impact patient care.
Finding opportunities for automation often means spending money, but it’s an area that quickly becomes a cost savings, not just in reducing data entry, but in giving clinicians the discrete data they need rather than wasting their time searching through PDFs. Dr. Fogg used a third-party vendor to automate the prescription-renewal requests her physicians were receiving, but healthcare automates in countless ways.
Many of Extract’s healthcare customers automate the classification, indexing, and routing of all of their incoming documents, others get more value in automatically receiving discrete data on lab results, while still others choose to automate the organization of messy referral packets. Understanding where automation is appropriate and what both the explicit financial and harder to measure time savings/satisfaction improvements might be.
Delegation isn’t just a matter of knowing who is best equipped to complete a certain task, but also the enforcement of it. This can be accomplished within the EHR by setting up rules to route tasks automatically rather than engaging in unnecessary triage or misdirected documents.
Collaboration involves making the best use of your staff’s skills. There are messages that clinicians receive that aren’t so trivial that they should be filtered from an inbox but could be handled by a medical assistant instead of a physician. This not only speeds up the care process for patients, but also allows overworked physicians to reduce their inbox burden.
If you have processes that could be enhanced with automated classification, indexing, abstraction, routing, or even redaction, please reach out to us and we’ll get in touch right away to show you how our software works.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.