Spending More Time With EHR Than Patients? Good Or Bad?
The role of technology in the healthcare industry is unbelievable today. The automation tools have reduced the time spent on complex tasks and make finding health information easier and communication even easier. But, when talking about EHR, the physicians and patients are not satisfied. Physicians may feel that they are spending more time on updating and responding to EHR requests than actually diagnosing patients. Is it good or bad?
Spending time with EHR is a good thing when it comes to health record maintenance, reduce data errors, and making appointments easier. But spending too much time than usual is a thing to make a note of which helps physicians to take care of their patients too. In this article, we have described some of the super cool ways to make the best use Of electronic health record software by spending less time with EHR and more time with patients.
Get enough training: Have you ever gotten a new phone and found it took you a few days to get used to it? That’s because the technology is new to you. The same idea applies to EHRs. Sufficient training helps you quickly learn how the technology works, which can make a difference in your productivity.
Practice workflows: EHR systems can have up to 200 functions. During a training session, encourage your facility to offer the option of simulated environments and patient scenarios. These simulated options can allow you to get to know what functions are most commonly used to place an order for a patient or respond to a request.
Take advantage of templates: Many EHR systems have built-in functions and features that can help reduce time spent on certain activities. Take time to think about the activities you do most often and see if any features can help expedite these processes.
Try entering documentation during patient visits: Entering information into your EHRs while in the room with the patient can help reduce the amount of time spent on these tasks at the end of the day. Healthcare Dive recommends mastering the ability to use the system while still interacting with and keeping the focus on the patient.
Tech advancements — such as voice recognition, digital scribes, and connected devices — are already beginning to further automate and reduce time spent entering information into the EHR. But once all of the information is in the EHR, clinicians still need help with the other half of the problem: the EHR user experience, which is widely viewed as being many years behind that of other industries.
Innovation is needed to enable clinicians to receive contextually relevant insights without having to comb through reams of unstructured information in the EHR. Innovation is also needed around designing better user experiences and reconsidering what form factors (e.g., mobile) will work best.
We are optimistic that better days are on the horizon for clinicians and that we are past the nadir of the EHR usability problem. Improvements will not occur automatically though, and there needs to be widespread recognition that physicians spending half their time using EHRs is a health care crisis that must be fixed.
There should be a mandate for payers to standardize and reduce their documentation requirements. Equally as important, we should strengthen APIs and secure data-sharing standards to unleash transformative innovation. These efforts, combined with providers diligently reviewing and optimizing their EHR workflows, will transform EHRs from being a time sink to a time saver and joy to use.
Final Thoughts
EMR can bring in greater efficiencies and result in increased revenues as all the critical information is available at the click of a button. It covers billing records, patient appointments, and even medical updates; all of it is consolidated in a user-friendly way, which affects productivity. Outsourcing can help you be assured that the experts are constantly upgrading codes to the EHR software and that will help remove delays and inefficiencies.
