{"id":3627,"date":"2020-06-08T03:19:38","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T03:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orionhealth-blog.local\/?p=3627"},"modified":"2025-03-28T01:03:34","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T01:03:34","slug":"how-to-ease-clinician-cognitive-overload","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionhealth.com\/global\/blog\/how-to-ease-clinician-cognitive-overload\/","title":{"rendered":"How to ease clinician cognitive overload"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Clinicians today&nbsp;are not only&nbsp;expected to provide exceptional patient care&nbsp;but also reduce hospital readmissions, advance&nbsp;community health, stay abreast of medical research, adopt new medical technologies,&nbsp;and cope&nbsp;with an ever-evolving regulatory structure.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In addition to that, clinicians now&nbsp;use complex&nbsp;Electronic Medical Records (EMR)&nbsp;that require multiple mouse clicks to complete tasks,&nbsp;along with complex alerts and information-dense user screens.&nbsp;Many studies have documented a&nbsp;close-response relationship between EMR usability and the odds of clinician burnout.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">More data is good- so long as it can be understood quickly and easily<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>With advances in&nbsp;the adoption of EMR&nbsp;and Electronic Health Record (EHR)&nbsp;technology&nbsp;in the clinic, there has&nbsp;come&nbsp;an explosion of data.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This data&nbsp;is&nbsp;presented to clinicians along with&nbsp;the&nbsp;unstated&nbsp;expectation that they will review each item of data and respond appropriately in the context of the patient\u2019s overall clinical picture.&nbsp;This&nbsp;may lead to&nbsp;a great deal of clinician mental effort,&nbsp;sometimes, unfortunately,&nbsp;wasted if the&nbsp;data isn\u2019t relevant to the current problem.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Clinicians are now inundated with more volumes and types of data than ever before&nbsp;and there\u2019s an urgent need to organise and present the data for efficient processing by the clinician.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Clinician workflows are already non-linear and disruptive, and technology with&nbsp;poorly presented&nbsp;data, notifications and alerts can&nbsp;quickly&nbsp;add to this burden.&nbsp;Cognitive overload&nbsp;makes&nbsp;it harder for&nbsp;clinicians&nbsp;to focus on critical patient care tasks&nbsp;and&nbsp;is&nbsp;an unintended consequence of poorly designed&nbsp;systems&nbsp;and&nbsp;likely&nbsp;one of the major causes of clinician burnout.<sup>1<\/sup>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Time-starved clinicians&nbsp;experience notification fatigue&nbsp;<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>As well as specific data, notifications and alerts are well recognised to be a key problem. Too many alerts of low value and the clinician will either turn them off or simply ignore them altogether. Not enough high priority alerts and clinicians may lose trust in the system.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Clinicians\u00a0spend a significant\u00a0part\u00a0of their day addressing\u00a0alerts and\u00a0notifications\u00a0generated by their\u00a0information\u00a0technology systems.\u00a0Types of notifications include\u00a0abnormal\u00a0test results,\u00a0referral\u00a0responses, medication refill requests, and messages from other clinicians, care teams\u00a0and so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC4860883\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\"><strong>study<\/strong><\/a>&nbsp;found that primary care physicians spend over an hour or 66.8 minutes each day processing notifications. And because a single notification often&nbsp;has&nbsp;multiple data points, such as metabolic panels containing multiple laboratory values, the actual cognitive effort placed on the clinician is even greater.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When clinicians are bombarded with so much information&nbsp;throughout&nbsp;the day, they can become overloaded and it becomes difficult to focus on critical patient care tasks and can lead to medical errors.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><em>Interested in finding out more about how our range of solutions can help you&nbsp;ease&nbsp;cognitive overload?&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/orionhealth.com\/contact\/\">Contact us<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p><sup><strong>1<\/strong><\/sup>&nbsp;&nbsp;Franklin&nbsp;A. (2015) The Unintended Consequences of the Technology in Clinical Settings. In: Patel V.,&nbsp;Kannampallil&nbsp;T., Kaufman D. (eds) Cognitive Informatics for Biomedicine. Health Informatics. Springer, Cham&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Clinicians today&nbsp;are not only&nbsp;expected to provide exceptional patient care&nbsp;but also reduce hospital readmissions, advance&nbsp;community health, stay abreast of medical research, adopt new medical technologies,&nbsp;and cope&nbsp;with an ever-evolving regulatory structure.&nbsp;&nbsp; In addition to that, clinicians now&nbsp;use complex&nbsp;Electronic Medical Records (EMR)&nbsp;that require multiple mouse clicks to complete tasks,&nbsp;along with complex alerts and information-dense user screens.&nbsp;Many studies have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":3628,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"region":[25,23],"class_list":["post-3627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","region-au","region-global"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>How to ease clinician cognitive overload - Orion Health<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How can we ease clinician cognitive overload? 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