Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)

Today’s physicians face some unique challenges. Patients are increasingly seeing reduced engagement from physicians who are often rushed and distracted during visits because of the documentation burden, leading to 71% of surveyed patients feeling “frustrated” with their healthcare experience. And with the added frustrations of stressful platform toggling in the shift to telehealth and reimbursements denied due to inaccurate or insufficient documentation, 64% of U.S. physicians say the pandemic has intensified their sense of burnout.

Using their mobile device, physicians unobtrusively record their visits, streaming their speech to the Nuance AI platform, where it gets translated into a clinical node and goes through a quality review process to ensure accuracy before being entered into the EHR. The physician then simply has to review and sign off on the notes, saving time and reducing physician fatigue and burnout.

Scribe programs started with the idea of reducing the data-entry burden on physicians, but high turnover and lack of industry standards and certification for scribes can lead to inconsistent documentation quality and an additional training burden on the physician.

With pandemic-related stress exacerbated by ever-increasing administrative workloads, physician burnout is at an all-time high. How can healthcare organizations help reduce providers’ feelings of burnout and improve the patient experience?

With the annual revenue loss of one physician vacancy estimated at more than $2 million – and the cost to recruit replacements estimated at $250,000 each – losses of $4.68 billion per year can be attributed to physician burnout.

In a recent HIMSS survey, 59% of hospital leadership staff said that they have lost potential reimbursements over the last year due to poor data quality, and 47% reported inaccuracies in their quality reporting due to poor-quality data.

Many EHR problem lists have duplicate entries, outdated diagnoses and other information unrelated to a patient’s present condition, leading to confusion and frustration for clinicians.

While most provider organizations have taken on some type of performance risk, only 15% have moved to pure population-based payment—and that figure is stalled, projected to grow a mere 1% by 2025.

Health IT leaders and federal officials have spent years attempting to solve the challenges Larry Ellison says his company can fix. Many experts are skeptical. But if Oracle can make it happen, it would be a major achievement for healthcare.

The lack of interoperability in healthcare ecosystems is a critical issue for U.S. healthcare. The recent issuance of the Interoperability and Patient Access final rule (CMS-9115-F) by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) addresses this by driving interoperability and providing patients with access to their own health information when they need it. Because of this rule, the use of APIs in healthcare has become a mandated requirement of a digital healthcare integration solution. When selecting an API integration vendor to partner with, flexibility and healthcare experience are key. WSO2’s healthcare domain knowledge and expertise mean that the WSO2 Open Healthcare Platform can be deployed on-prem, in multiple clouds, in VMs and in containers.