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Enter username. Click.
Enter password. Click. Open electronic health record system. Click. Navigate to documentation. Click, click. Navigate to patient record. Click, click. Enter patient encounter information.
Click, click, click, click.
“Click fatigue” is one small piece of the physician burnout puzzle—doctors spend up to 20 minutes per day simply logging into the hospital’s EHR—along with heavy administrative burdens, less facetime with patients, and other factors. Burnout can contribute to medical errors, problems with care quality, physician disengagement, mental health problems, and even cause physicians to leave the practice.
Physicians spend about half of their days performing administrative tasks, says a report from the Annals of Internal Medicine, and that desktop time has been attributed as a major factor in physician burnout. In fact, a recent study showed 70 percent of doctors using EHRs pinned the bulk of administrative burdens on the software.
Get your EHR in shape for 2019 and reinvigorate your facility with our tips below for your physicians and hospital. These simple improvements will help shake things up to help physicians fight fatigue so the only burn they’re feeling is from these healthy exercises.
The news about EHRs and physician burnout isn’t all doom and gloom. Proper training, streamlined documentation, and software optimization can help make the physician experience much more positive and reduce administrative burdens.
Physicians who have more experience working in an EHR had favorable opinions of the software versus those who were new to the technology, according to a 2017 study in the Journal of Medical Health & Informatics. Hospitals should work with their EHR vendors to provide proper onboarding training to newly hired physicians as well as ongoing training support for clinicians to battle burnout.
Physicians spend a great deal of time documenting patient encounters and entering information throughout the day. Improving documentation efficiency can alleviate time spent on these administrative tasks and give physicians more facetime with their patients.
To achieve a streamlined documentation experience, hospitals should leverage templates where possible, use the EHR to automate tasks, and evaluate ways to simplify documentation, and order entry.
Finally, hospitals should analyze how their hospital EHR fits with existing workflows and make adjustments to ensure software use is an intuitive part of the process from beginning to end. The 2017 study also showed that more than half of physicians using EHRs optimized to their workflows felt it saved them time.
Staff turnover, lack of expertise, and regulatory changes are common reasons for process and operational deficiencies in hospital EHRs. MEDHOST partners with hospitals from the outset to help provide optimized workflows to improve efficiency, boost physician satisfaction, and result in better outcomes. This includes pre-implementation research, time on-site to help optimize the system, and thorough ongoing communication and support designed to ensure lasting results.
MEDHOST’s electronic health record system was designed with physicians and inpatient environments in mind to help streamline processes and make EHR responsibilities fit naturally into the hospital workflow.
With advanced features like Physician Experience that integrate Chart, Note, and Order Management functions into a seamless experience, documentation becomes a more streamlined part of the physician’s workflow.
Fight the pain! Email a MEDHOST representative today at inquiries@medhost.com or speak with one our MEDHOST experts by calling 1–800-383-6278. It’s just what the doctor ordered!
