KLAS Research has published another healthcare survey, this time looking at EHR Response Time & Reliability and its impact on clinician satisfaction. With burnout as an unavoidable topic in healthcare lately, finding ways to keep employees more empowered and satisfied with their jobs is always welcome.
The report comes from the KLAS Arch Collaborative, a group comprising of over 250 healthcare organizations, surveying hundreds of thousands of users to gather insights from their experience.
The first, somewhat unsurprising takeaway is that clinicians like their EHR more and feel patients are safer when it is fast and reliable. Workflows and the technology used to accelerate their processes have been linked before by KLAS as they reported higher satisfaction for organizations who have achieved HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7.
Overall, the results showed that there is definitely work to do in making more efficient use of electronic medical records. 44 percent of clinicians disagreed with the statement that their EHR is fast enough while 23 percent disagreed that their EHR is available when they need it.
These issues share origins with more than just the EHR though, with clinicians complaining about EHR metrics also having a higher frequency of complaints about hardware or login issues. While anecdotal, the report mentions a nurse who has nearly a tenth of their day eaten up by the time between when a password is entered and the system has loaded! We all know that the agonizing time waiting for technology can feel longer than it is, so maybe that respondent exaggerated a bit, but check your watch the next time you log in. Regardless, it's still an issue of satisfaction for employees and the larger data set highlights some undeniable links.
The report does include a basic set of recommendations an organization can start with including gathering metrics, updating software, and procuring new hardware.
The problem with deploying new machines or strengthening Wi-Fi coverage is that it takes time, it takes money, and it’s a bandage. One of the questions the report suggested organizations ask themselves is, “Do we know how long it takes to shift between windows or tabs in the EHR?”
It’s a good question to ask and one that has some progress that can be made with hardware and money, but as you answer that question it’s also worth asking, “Why do we have to shift tabs so frequently?”
Those types of examinations into your workflows can result in pure efficiencies for your organization before you even start to look at hardware.
We sell our software to transplant directors, health information management VPs, and others who populate EHRs with the information on faxes, papers, scans, and email attachments that flow into healthcare organizations 24/7. Simply put, our HealthyData Platform automates all of it, for all document types, so your staff can do something more valuable than data entry and you’ll need fewer people to get discrete data in the EHR.
We made sure that value proposition has held up and are proud to say we’re saving healthcare institutions money, but what really excites us is knowing that a clinician won’t have to switch back and forth between tabs, looking for a test result on a pdf, because it will exist as discrete data in the patient’s medical record.
These are the problems we’re motivated to solve; and having well-informed customers who raise interesting questions with us has led us to wide-ranging solutions like perfecting incoming referrals or extracting data from invoices like we’d do for a lab result.
The goal is to make healthcare more efficient so clinicians can do their jobs more easily, with better data, and never have to stick a barcode label on a document again. You don’t need a different company to enter your data for you, you need your staff, being more efficient with your data, your security protocols, and your workflow.
Send us a note or give us a call, we look forward to seeing what challenges we can solve for your organization.
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.