Often much of the documentation, including clinical notes, diagnostic reports, and records from other providers, are in an unstructured format. To find the critical patient information they need at the point of care, users must wade through pages and pages of records.
Clinicians need information that helps them deliver better patient care, which is why we need to support them with technologies that organize and intelligently filter all the stuff in a patient chart. We also need to give users the ability to retrieve context-driven and problem-specific information in real-time for the patient in front of them.
Provide functionality not flash
Clinical solutions that are shiny and new aren’t necessarily better – especially if they make EHRs more burdensome and less functional. Consider, for example, Amazon’s recently announced transcription solution, which takes a spoken conversation between a patient and doctor, translates the details to text, and stores the note in the EHR. While the clinician might save time documenting the encounter, the EHR could easily become less functional at the point of care if the captured data is not stored in a format that supports clinical decision making and forces users to spend more time searching for and interpreting the information.
To improve the usability of EHRs, health IT vendors need to prioritize functionality over flash and deliver solutions that give clinicians easier access to clinical data. For example, a physician examining a patient with diabetes needs a “diabetic view” of the patient, including a snapshot view of all the patient’s diabetes-related history. This eliminates the need to go through pages and pages of past clinical encounters to find relevant information. Physicians are more productive and empowered to efficiently assess the situation.
Physicians also need solutions that support – rather than replace – clinical decision making. An experienced physician can diagnose a patient’s condition and recommend an appropriate therapy in less time than it takes to document the patient’s symptoms. Rather than technologies that suggest a diagnosis and treatment based on the details entered into the computer, clinicians need ready access to clean and actionable data that support their ability to make clinical decisions. Afterall, the best tool in the exam room is not the computer but the physician’s brain.
At the industry continues to develop new health IT technologies, we need to consider the advice from CMS’s usability report and prioritize solutions that reduce the burdens related to the use of health IT so that clinicians have more time to focus on what matters – caring for their patients.
About the author: David Lareau is the chief executive officer of Medicomp Systems, which provides physician-driven, point-of-care solutions that fix EHRs.
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