A personal journey motivating change

Chris brings his personal perspective from having been a clinician for 20 years, working in primary and secondary care, with 10 years of experience in family medicine. Chris states that one of the biggest challenges he faced, along with other health professionals, is clinician burnout. This has now become worse due to the outbreak. 

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 too 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.

Clinician burnout is a global challenge health systems face. Chris’ experience with burnout is what motivates him, and that’s why Orion Health focuses on providing solutions that tackle clinician burnout and alleviate cognitive overload. This is where an Integrated Digital Care Record comes into play. 

Integrated Digital Care Records enable the best decisions at the point of care

An Integrated Digital Care Record is a system that integrates an Australian patient’s health and care data from disparate systems across a geography into a single view. By pulling data from both traditional and non-traditional sources, clinicians and caregivers have a comprehensive view of their patients to make the best possible decisions at the point of care. This allows the healthcare sector to connect everything from acute care to GPs, to allied health to create that one essential care record for the patient. 

So what does this mean for the clinician?

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.

By gathering all the patient data and presenting 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 for patient data and more time listening to the patient. 

In the full podcast, Chris explores frontline clinical workers, the importance of delivering empathetic care, and how Orion Health is positioned to help with presenting smart data in meaningful ways to help alleviate cognitive overload and clinician burnout.