In their book titled Preventing Physician Burnout, Curing the Chaos and Returning Joy to the Practice of Medicine Paul DeChant, MD, MBA and Diane Shannon, MD, MPH outline the primary causes of the recent rise in clinician burnout and how health systems can work to mitigate its harmful effects. One of the largest drivers of clinician burnout, according to DeChant and Shannon, is the “inefficient design of many EHR systems,” which has led to an “uptick in the time devoted to nonclinical tasks, less efficient workflow, negative effects on interpersonal relationships, and negative effects on the quality of care.”
Wellsheet is a sponsor of the American Medical Association’s International Conference on Physician Health to be held October 13-15, 2022 in Orlando, Florida. We are excited to hear Dr. DeChant give the opening keynote, but I wanted to share a few thoughts from their book in advance.
The increasing quantity and complexity of patient data, combined with non-intuitive EHR interfaces, has dramatically increased the time clinicians must spend inputting and searching for data in the EHR, which “significantly [interferes] with the source of meaning in their work: direct interactions with patients” — a study led by Christine Sinsky, MD1 found that physicians spend two hours on the computer for every one hour spent in direct patient care and spend 1-2 hours each evening on additional EHR-related work. As Robert Wachter, MD, professor and associate chair in the University of California San Francisco Department of Medicine remarked in the book, “the EHR is an underemphasized joy zapper” for clinicians.
Unintuitive EHR systems can also have harmful effects beyond simply increasing burnout. “Poorly designed software can lead to mistakes in ordering tests and treatments, which can increase the risk to patients and the ultimate expense of care.” EHR inefficiency is a wide-reaching problem, affecting clinician wellbeing and efficiency, patient outcomes, and the bottom line of health systems.
In this book, DeChant and Shannon specifically named several failures of existing EHR systems, including:
- “failure to ensure clinician-oriented, user friendly design”
- “failure to ensure interoperability”
- “failure to anticipate the impact on clinicians”
Wellsheet’s recognized Smart EHR UI is a patented, platform-agnostic, predictive clinical workflow platform that works within an existing EHR to surface the most relevant content for clinicians in a view that is contextualized and prioritized for their needs. Wellsheet was specifically designed to address these failures of existing EHRs that DeChant and Shannon highlighted:
Failure to ensure clinician-oriented, user friendly design
Wellsheet’s intuitive platform anticipates clinicians’ specific needs and surfaces the most relevant clinical data, enhances care team collaboration with mobile rounding and handoff capabilities, and reduces barriers to discharge and Length of Stay (LOS). Wellsheet has spent years onsite working side by side with its clinician users, incorporating user feedback to produce the best possible workflow tool for clinicians. Wellsheet can be deployed within 24 hours at health systems and clinicians can be trained in minutes.
Wellsheet predicts and elevates the most relevant data from a Cerner, Epic or athenahealth Electronic Health Record (EHR) based on a clinician’s specialty and workflow habits, and prioritizes clinical content through specialized algorithms. It assembles the right information in a predictive, intuitive and customizable workflow that allows providers to quickly arrive at the correct clinical insights. Wellsheet’s Smart EHR UI is embedded within the EHR and gives clinicians the ability to understand what needs to be done without compromising the provider-patient interaction, enabling clinicians to make more informed decisions and reduce errors.
Failure to ensure interoperability
Wellsheet transforms the experience, both within the EHR and across EHRs, for overworked doctors, nurses and other care managers. Wellsheet’s Smart EHR UI can be deployed on Epic and Cerner EHR systems in both inpatient and outpatient settings in combination with athenahealth in ambulatory settings, allowing for streamlined, interoperable deployment models for health systems with multiple EHRs. Wellsheet has provided these benefits to leading health systems with all 3 EHR settings and serves as a common interface unifying the care collaboration.
Failure to anticipate the impact on clinicians
Wellsheet was designed to tackle the complexities and inefficiencies of EHRs in order to reduce the time clinicians spend searching for data and barriers to discharge. Wellsheet’s handoff and rounding features, as well as real-time notifications, have been proven to enhance care team collaboration and communication and provide an easy-to-use and intuitive interface. According to a KLAS Research report, over 86% of clinicians reported High Satisfaction with Wellsheet integrated into their existing EHR, while the other 14% reported Satisfaction. In addition, Wellsheet has been successfully deployed at scale at several major health systems, and has been proven to improve clinician satisfaction and reduce time spent in EHR by 40%.
In Preventing Physician Burnout, DeChant and Shannon urged health systems to make necessary investments to prevent clinician burnout: “Both the design of the EHR systems and the design of the clinical workflows must be fixed to solve the problems related to EHR.” In their action plans for hospital leaders and boards, DeChant and Shannon recommended placing burnout prevention as a key strategic priority to improve the lives of clinicians and the quality of patient care.
Wellsheet pioneered the Smart EHR UI, and is deployed enterprise-wide with tens of thousands of clinicians using it to increase the efficiency of their time in the EHR — improving job satisfaction and reducing burnout, worker turnover for physicians, nurses, and care managers and length of stay.
Read the following case study about Wellsheet’s enterprise-wide deployment at RWJBarnabas Health and how Wellsheet reduced time in the EHR and clinician burnout.
To learn more about how Wellsheet can reduce time in the EHR and clinician burnout, and impact your bottom line, see Wellsheet at #ICPH2022 in booth 13 or sign-up for a 1:1 demo.
