Optimizing EHR to Improve Workflow in Healthcare Organizations

EHR is an efficient method for organizing patient information and streamlining medical documentation. It is a convenient and organized method of delivering error-free patient data. EHR allows easy access to patients’ medical history, which is required to improve communication with the patients. It makes it easier for doctors to follow up with the patients and track continuing care under their supervision. It allows physicians and other healthcare providers to reach an accurate diagnosis more quickly and thereby improve overall efficiency of the hospitals and staffs. However, EHR still poses certain concerns for healthcare providers. The major barrier is the challenge faced by physicians in capturing patient narrative. The template format is more or less inefficient in this regard. To reduce EHR burden on doctors, a practical solution is hiring the service of transcription firms providing HIPAA medical transcription. When the documentation responsibility is outsourced to such a provider, physicians get more quality time to spend with their patients and for other core responsibilities.

Use of Artificial Intelligence

EHR use has created several problems like disrupted clinician workflows, lack of interoperability, and data overload. But with advanced technologies these problems can be rectified. According to a survey by the Center for Connected Medicine (CCM), nearly one-third of hospitals and health systems reported that interoperability is insufficient, even within their own health organizations. A few respondents said that they are using new age tools like application programming interfaces (APIs), AI, and blockchain to enhance interoperability. Some others are using AI and advanced technologies. Fifty-three percent said that senior leadership commitment to interoperability could address challenges, and 52 percent said financial incentives or penalties address data sharing problems.

The important thing to note is that only with technological advancements and EHR interoperability, there can be real progress with regard to digital health initiatives and improved patient care.

Boosting EHR Usability by Optimizing EHR interface

Experts say that the EHR user interface is going to have a major impact on optimization. Easy-to-use, efficient Interface navigation is vital to make sure that providers use the tool successfully in their everyday practice, ensure patient safety and seamless clinical operations, and prevent burnout. An electronic health record system that is not well-designed or optimized can easily lead to a cluttered interface, complicated medication list, and other concerns. This brings forth the importance of EHR optimization, and any strategy to achieve this must focus on ensuring that providers spend less time interacting with EHR systems.

• Avoiding information overload is most important because too much of information can affect the clinician’s efficiency because they will have to spend time searching through large quantities of clinical data to find the information they want. For this, the EHR note templates can be redesigned to display less data to clinicians.

• Another option is to customize clinical workflows to meet the particular requirements of medical specialties, health systems, and hospitals among other care settings.

• New health IT tools and modules can be integrated into the EHR systems to enhance clinical operations and delivery of patient care. However, when choosing and implementing such a tool, usability should be prioritized.

• Through EHR-integrated links, providers can be given direct access to external databases such as prescription drug monitoring programs or PDMPs. This will help reduce the number of log-ins required for providers while also streamlining health data viewing. When clinicians have the complete patient prescription histories, they can more easily identify patients who may be visiting multiple doctors for several prescriptions. It helps promote safe drug prescribing practices

Virtual Assistants Could Help with Better Documentation

Physicians see patients after patients, and this could easily cause cognitive burden and along with this they face the problem of medical documentation. Mark Grenitz, MD, said in an interview with EHR Intelligence, that when physicians jump from patients to patients they have to rely on their memory while drafting medical records. One way to tackle this issue is by implementing a well-designed EHR scribe tool into the EHR workflow.IKS Health developed an EHR scribe technology called Scribble to deal with this issue. This new technology can record the visit from start to finish, which reduces cognitive burden and after completion of patient visit, medical professionals can read and edit the transcript.

Tech Giants like Google, Amazon etc are using their technology to get into the medical field, to reduce the amount of mouse clicks, the change of computer screens, and ultimately the cognitive workload by introducing this voice-enabled technology. Amazon announced the launch of Amazon Transcribe Medical, a speech recognition service that can transcribe clinician and patient speech into text. This will limit the amount of extensive note taking.

Clinicians can also consider a combined approach of medical transcription and EHR. The physicians can dictate the patient’s data in a recording device and the digital device will capture all the information clearly. These audio files are encrypted and sent to trained medical transcriptionists who transcribe these audio files into accurate clinical documentation which are integrated into the EHR. The main advantage of this combined approach is that it satisfies the government mandate of implementing EHR and also ensures error-free and accurate clinical documentation. It helps physicians to interact more with the patients and focus on giving better quality service.

By hiring a reliable medical transcription service that provides EHR-integrated medical transcription, healthcare units can improve their efficiency with fast, accurate, efficient solutions. These providers offer flexible dictation options for physicians in individual practices, private hospitals, multi- speciality hospitals and clinics. Clinicians can rest assured that their medical documentation requirements are met in a timely and most efficient way.