Burnout, Again
It’s unfortunate that burnout among healthcare clinicians has become an evergreen topic, but given its increased prevalence, it’s being tracked and analyzed more than ever. Even just a month ago, we were talking about how EHR reliability and response times are contributing to clinician burnout.
The latest to weigh in is United States Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy. Murthy’s office has a whole webpage devoted to answering questions, suggestions for dealing with burnout, guides, and media content on the topic. Two of the biggest areas that Murthy focuses on are prior authorizations and EHR usage. Moving to electronic prior authorizations could have a big impact not just on burnout, but in revenues as well. With a staggering 85 percent of physicians reporting high (or extremely high) prior authorization burdens, a fully electronic system could save 12 minutes per transaction and return over $400 million to the industry as a whole.
The other opportunity to reduce burnout is with technology. Whether it’s reducing alert fatigue, creating better integrations, or creating more interoperable data, the way that clinicians interact with patient medical records has plenty of room for improvement.
Putting Ideas into Action
The problem with the suggestions from the Surgeon General isn’t that they aren’t good ideas or wouldn’t be effective, but lies in the implementation. Most of the issues fueling clinician burnout, while exacerbated by the pandemic, have been around for years without abatement. Interoperability, integrations, and alerts aren’t new concepts, but they often require holistic organizational buy-in to remedy. Taking a larger view of an organization can show where an integration that may not appear to have a return on investment pays off in downstream aspects of an organization whether it’s giving clinicians time back in their day to reduce burnout and/or see more patients, having more complete quality and reporting measures, or just getting a more accurate picture of your patients.
It's obviously a bit more difficult to assign definitive dollars and cents to how reducing a single aspect of burnout might translate into turnover costs or time savings, but they’re the types of things that snowball into either a productive work environment or one with a revolving door.
Extract Systems’ marketing materials often refer to these less tangible benefits. Our company’s goal is to make clinicians’ lives easier, provide more complete and accurate data for better patient care, and to remove wasteful manual processes from workflows. We accomplish all three of these goals by solving for those manual processes.
Seeing the Benefits
We’ve found that moving from manual data entry to our automated data extraction platform, HealthyData, more than pays for itself by cutting data entry costs in half, but as with other solutions for burnout, the exciting effects are felt cumulatively down the line. When clinicians receive fully paginated and organized referral packets, when they see discrete data in a patient’s medical history instead of a series of pdf images, or when they’re properly alerted to a health maintenance plan trigger, their lives are made easier and they can contribute to better patient outcomes.
Even if you’re looking at a relatively tame project like increasing the consistency of your document naming conventions, it’s important to keep the end-user clinician in mind and involved as a part of the process. People don’t get into healthcare to re-transcribe documents or play Where’s Waldo? in a pdf and removing the limitations of data exchange and ingestion allows them to focus on the tasks that inspire passion in your patients and organization.
In EHRIntelligence’s summary of the Surgeon General’s advisory, they relayed how Hawaii Pacific Health tackled 1700 monthly hours of wasted nursing time with a program called, “Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff.” While tongue-in-cheek, this practical way of looking at your organization’s procedures can be a great way of uncovering legacy decisions or methods that have been left in place for the wrong reasons (i.e., “that’s how we’ve always done it”).
If the thought of getting more complete data faster sounds interesting, please fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch with case studies, an introductory phone call, or a demonstration of the software, whatever you’d like.
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.