Physician burnout is finally getting the attention it deserves nationally, but some forward-thinking institutions have long been at the forefront of the movement to give physicians and other healthcare workers the resources they need to deliver care safely and efficiently. Wellsheet is excited to announce its work with another one of these institutions, RWJBarnabas Health, the largest integrated health system in the state of New Jersey.
Executive leadership at RWJBarnabas Health (RWJBH) includes clinician well-being among its strategic imperatives and recognizes it as crucial to achieving its mission of providing consistently outstanding levels of patient care services. They understand that to provide the best quality of care to patients, clinicians need the best tools at their disposal. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are a necessary part of that toolset, but their design too often introduces additional burden to physicians. Health systems invest millions of dollars to upgrade and optimize the EHR, but change is slow and the results are often underwhelming.
RWJBarnabas Health was ready to try a new way. In early 2018, RWJBarnabas Health contracted with Wellsheet to bring an intelligent add-on to their EHR to deliver a modern experience for their physicians. Newark Beth Israel Medical Center (NBIMC) was chosen as the initial deployment site for Wellsheet because of its culture of innovation. Because Wellsheet is integrated entirely via novel, standardized APIs, the product was live in a few weeks for physician use.
8 months later, Wellsheet was in use at 2 hospitals by over 500 physicians. After a multi-hospital survey showed overwhelming support for the product and a study of EHR data showed a 40% reduction in time in the EHR, RWJBarnabas Health knew that the product should be brought to physicians across the health system. Wellsheet is proud to announce the commitment RWJBH has made to leverage Wellsheet across 7 hospitals, where Wellsheet is now deployed, to solve one of the biggest sources of clinician burnout, the inefficiency of EHR design.
“The clinical team understands that the electronic health record (EHR) helps the organization maintain the highest quality and safety standards,” said Dr. Stephen O’Mahony, MD, FACP, Vice President and Chief Health Information Officer (CHIO) at RWJBarnabas Health. “Clinicians are spending way too much time entering data into the EHR, and then searching for that data to pull it back out of the EHR to support clinical decisions and patient care. Wellsheet lives on top of the EHR and knows who I am as a provider, who this patient is, and provides me with the data I need in a way that is really easy to digest. It helps show our physicians a total picture of the patient and highlights care gaps, opportunities, and how to best treat the patient in real time. It’s all wrapped up in a package that’s easy to understand and navigate and it can save our physicians a couple of hours each day, which they appreciate.”
The entire Wellsheet organization feels gratified by the response physicians have had to the Wellsheet product and the impact it has had for their practice of medicine. Our mission is to eliminate EHR-caused burnout, and our work with RWJBarnabas Health proves that this is possible on a grand scale.
Learn more about RWJBarnabas Health’s deployment of Wellsheet by watching a video of RWJBH physicians using Wellsheet, joining a webinar with Dr. O’Mahony on September 23, 2020 at 2:00 PM ET, or reading an RWJBH case study.
