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Healthcare professionals in Australia are constantly segmenting what is important and urgent when it comes to reviewing patient data. But due to the volumes and different types of patient data they are presented with on a daily basis, they can be overloaded and have difficulty segmenting. This can lead to mistakes.
Take for instance, Dr Chris Hobson, our very own Chief Medical Officer, who shares his personal perspective from having been a clinician for 20 years. Chris states that one of the biggest challenges he faced, along with other healthcare professionals, is clinician cognitive burnout, which has now only escalated due to the recent outbreak.
One study found that clinicians spend approximately 33% of their work hours performing direct clinical work and 49% completing clerical tasks and interfacing with the EHR. For every hour of clinical work, clinicians spent two hours on clerical or EHR-related tasks¹.
Each year in Australia, medical errors result in as many as 18,000 unnecessary deaths, and more than 50,000 people become disabled each year². Communication problems and cognitive overload have been associated with medical errors.
Poor EHR usability is very high on the list of factors contributing to clinician burnout. Having to process too much information, much of it redundant, having to perform far too many mouse clicks, and receiving many intrusive alerts to complete basic tasks, leaves clinicians feeling dominated by their EHR and subjugated to its endless demands. Another key issue is the general lack of support for integration and collaborative care provided by siloed EHR systems.
So is there a way we can help reduce the cognitive load on our Australian healthcare workers?
Introducing the next-generation HIE
This is where a next-generation Health Information Exchange (HIE) can help. The next-generation HIE will enable the strategic management of data as a core asset and derive maximum value from the data collected.
While a clinician may review each patient’s record in isolation, deriving certain insights from the information available, no single person has the capacity to do this across the millions of records housed in today’s HIEs.
So in order to leverage the collective experience that this data represents, it requires enhanced capabilities such as risk prediction, natural language processing, pathway and resource optimisation along with modern technology and standards.
The next-generation HIE can present relevant health information in an intelligent and timely manner, has the flexibility for emerging and non-traditional data types, organises data, so that it is easy for the clinician to access and use, and provides an innovative ecosystem for future developments.
How can Orion Health help ease your burden?
Care won’t get less complex, and information will only continue to grow, so what can Orion Health do to lessen clinician cognitive burnout?
Clinicians need easy access to the right data to make decisions at the individual clinical level and, frequently, at the level of the population, they are responsible for.
Our HIE solution gathers all patient data and presents it to the clinician easily, it removes the time-consuming task of searching for the right patient information and also ordering tests that have already been done. Instead, the clinician can spend less time looking and deciphering patient data and more time listening to the patient.
For more information read the next-generation HIE whitepaper which looks at each of the HIE capabilities and how they can help deliver healthcare more efficiently in the future.
Or check out our HIE solution page for more details.
- Murphy, D. R., Meyer, A. N., Russo, E., Sittig, D. F., Wei,L., & Singh, H. (2016). The Burden of Inbox Notifications in Commercial Electronic Health Records. JAMA internal medicine, 176(4), 559–560. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.0209
- Saul N Weingart, Ross McL Wilson, Robert W Gibberd, Bernadette Harrison. Epidemiology of medical error. BMJ; 320: 774–7.
