How Can the Health Informatics Field Reduce Clinician Burnout?

According to the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, prior to the pandemic, clinician burnout was considered a global crisis. Clinician burnout has been highly documented when it comes to dealing with alert fatigue and the use of the EMR/EHR within healthcare organizations. In this blog post, I am going to outline how advances in health informatics can help to reduce clinician burnout when dealing with digital platforms.

1. Reduce Manual Data Entry
   
   One of the contributing issues to physician burnout is the amount of data entry clinicians are required to enter into the EHR both during their interactions with patients and sometimes even after hours. It is estimated that clinicians can spend up to 1/3 of their time navigating through the EHR during patient interactions. With the advent of voice-to-text technology, this not only results in the ability to record notes more easily than typing but eventually with the advancement of natural language processing (NLP), a subset of artificial intelligence, providers might be able to ask questions of the EHR, similar to how we use Google Home or Alexa. Instead of clinicians having to spend precious time scrolling through poorly designed medical records they can ask directly and get their answers quickly.
   
   There will have to be a great deal of work done within the health informatics field to ensure that the algorithm using NLP can recognize different accents and that the algorithm is trained to understand medical terminology and coding to further speed up documentation. Furthermore, if the voice-to-text technology can be customized to specific departments such as oncology or orthopedics, with standard prescriptions, this will help with the auto-population of data and result in cost and time savings.
   
   One of the downsides to this technology is that the clinician would need to proofread the records for mistakes made and this editing time might affect the time reduction benefits. One potential solution to this would be to build flags into the system and to have drop-down menu options whenever possible, to limit the number of mistakes that might occur with free-text options. In my opinion, a hybrid system where the technology can aid the medical scribe to ensure the completeness and accuracy of the data entered in the EMR and EHR is a good balance to reducing the burden on the clinician and strengthening the relationship with the patient.
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Ongoing Training and Feedback
   
   When it comes to reducing clinician burnout, continuous training of clinicians by health informatics professionals prior to, during, and after EHR implementation is key to helping clinicians navigate the system with greater ease. Also, once individuals understand the system well this can help them to buy into the overall success. With ongoing training, one can identify users with proficient technical skills and who might want to take on the role of “super-user”, this person can be an invaluable resource to the organization to help others who might be struggling with the use of the EHR and who need help from a clinician’s viewpoint and not necessarily from the vendor side.
   
   In addition, EHR and EMR systems are constantly adapting and can be customized to the clinician’s needs with the use of APIs using FHIR (fast health interoperability resources) standards. With feedback from clinicians, health informatics professionals can communicate this feedback to leadership to see how relevant feedback can be integrated. This is how the EHR and EMR can be transformed into a system that is designed with a patient-centered approach and can help to reduce the burden of data entry due to poor system design.
   
   In conclusion, I believe through engaging clinicians, using existing technology to reduce data entry, and providing ongoing training and integrating feedback from clinicians, the field of health informatics can help to reduce the burden on clinicians and hopefully provide a solution to this current global crisis affecting healthcare. Comment down below? How can the health informatics field make a difference to help reduce clinician burnout?