What is a Smart EHR UI

By

Craig Limoli

,

CEO and Founder of Wellsheet

July 19, 2022

What is a Smart EHR UI

It’s no secret that EHRs consistently perform poorly on usability, slow down clinical workflows, and contribute to health worker burnout, which impacts clinician staffing and the bottom line at healthcare systems. Smart EHR UI offerings improve usability and reduce the time and effort to find, access and share relevant clinical information. I have personally been gratified to see the immense impact of this technology across the thousands of physicians, nurses, and care managers who rely on Wellsheet for their day-to-day care delivery.

What is a Smart EHR UI?

In a recently released Gartner® report, Hype Cycle™ for Digital Care Delivery Including Virtual Care, 2022*, authored by Sharon Hakkennes and Veronica Walk, and published 9 July 2022 (ID G00768917), Smart EHR UI was cited as an emerging innovation with a high benefit rating and less than 1% of market penetration, and is defined as:

“Smart EHR UI — Smart electronic health record (EHR) user interface (UI) solutions use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to synthesize, summarize and elevate relevant clinical data from the EHR and other clinical data sources, creating a contextualized view of the patient record.”

Wellsheet was named as a Sample Vendor in the Smart EHR UI category in this Gartner report, which went on to state that “as EHR adoption continues to grow and interoperability initiatives accelerate, the volume and complexity of clinical data clinicians must navigate become increasingly challenging. EHR data is usually organized chronologically in complex and non-standard hierarchies and is presented without consideration for clinical relevance or context. We expect increased adoption of smart EHR UI solutions to solve the growing complexity and volume of clinical data.”                                                                        

“Smart EHR UI solutions offer healthcare provider organizations a way to improve EHR usability without significant time or resource requirements from internal IT departments or EHR vendors. These solutions integrate with EHRs primarily through fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) APIs, resulting in shorter implementation timelines and minimal integration costs. The adoption of FHIR interoperability standards is lowering the bar for vendors seeking to integrate with EHRs.”

Smart EHR UI solutions also provide much needed support for clinical workflows like handoff, rounding, and real-time notifications, and result in more efficient care delivery that can impact patient throughput and length of stay.

Why is a Smart EHR UI Important?                                                  

The Gartner report states, “EHRs consistently perform poorly on system usability scales (SUS), with acceptability ranging from low marginal to not acceptable. Poor EHR usability is strongly associated with clinician burnout, which is a prevalent and serious problem for healthcare provider organizations. Smart EHR UI solutions can improve usability and mitigate clinician burnout by reducing the time and effort to find relevant clinical information within the EHR.”

According to the Gartner report, “through the deployment of Smart EHR UI solutions, healthcare providers will:      

  • Increase clinician productivity and capacity by reducing time spent on chart review and searching for relevant clinical data.
  • Improve the total experience of patients and clinicians by maximizing the patient-clinician interaction, whether conducted virtually or in person.
  • Enable clinicians to make more informed decisions and reduce errors of omission by elevating relevant data that might otherwise be overlooked.”                   

“Healthcare providers are taking a multi-pronged approach to address the many contributing factors to clinician burnout, including the EHR. Clinician burnout has been exacerbated by pandemic conditions and has suffered from and contributed to unprecedented healthcare workforce shortages. Minimizing the burden on the care team and preventing further attrition or out-migration from the industry is a top priority in most healthcare provider organizations.”

Wellsheet pioneered the Smart EHR UI, and is deployed enterprise-wide with thousands of clinicians using it daily to reduce their time in the EHR - improving job satisfaction and reducing burnout and worker turnover for physicians, nurses, and care managers.

Wellsheet’s Smart EHR UI harnesses machine learning predictive models to anticipate physicians’ workflow needs, surfacing the most relevant clinical data based on their specialty and workflow habits. Wellsheet’s application has been deployed across large healthcare systems, payers, and community health centers and has been proven to reduce time spent by physicians in the EHR.

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 you can deploy Wellsheet’s Smart EHR UI, reduce clinician burnout, and impact your bottom line, sign-up for a 1:1 demo and ROI analysis.

*GARTNER® and HYPE CYCLE™ are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.