Despite many efforts to improve EHRs, few physicians see them as adding value to the practice. Sadly, it’s little surprise given that many vendors don’t worry much about what physicians want, focusing instead on selling features to CIOs.
As a result, they still don’t like their EHRs that much. In fact, a recent survey conducted by Stanford Medicine and the Harris Poll found that 44% of physicians said that the top value of the EHR was to serve as digital storage, which isn’t a ringing endorsement. Just eight percent saw the EHR as having clinical value, with three percent citing disease prevention, 2% clinical decision support and 3% patient engagement as top benefits.
Is it possible to create a new EHR model that physicians love? According to Stanford, we could build out an ideal EHR by the year 2028.
In Stanford’s vision, clinicians and other healthcare professionals simply take care of the patients without having to think about health records. Once examinations are complete, information would flow seamlessly to all parties involved, including payers, hospitals, physicians and the patient.
Meanwhile, it would be possible to populate the EHR with little or no effort. For example, an automated physician’s assistant would “listen” to interactions between the doctor and the patient and analyze what was said. Depending on what is said in the room, along with verbal cues of the clinicians, it would record all relevant information in the physical exam.
What’s more, the automated physician’s assistant would have AI capabilities, allowing it to synthesize medical literature, the patient’s history and relevant histories of other patients available in anonymized, aggregated form.
Having reviewed these factors, the system would then populate different possible diagnoses for the clinician to address. The analysis would take patient characteristics into account, including lifestyle, medication history, and genetic makeup.
In addition to its vision, the survey report offered some short-term recommendations on how medical practices can support physician EHR use. They included:
- Training physicians well on how to use the EHR when they’re coming on board, as well as when there are incremental changes to the system
- Involving physicians in the development of clinical workflows that take advantage of EHR capabilities
- Delivering EHR development projects as quickly as possible once physicians request them
- Making data analytics abilities available to physicians in a manner that can be used intuitively at the point of care
- Considering automated solutions to eliminate manual EHR documentation
Technologists, for their part, can take also take immediate steps to support physician EHR use, including:
- Developing systems and product updates in partnership with physicians
- Limiting the use of manual EHR documentation by using AI, natural language processing and other emerging technologies
- Using AI to perform several other functions, including synthesizing and summarizing relevant information in the EHR for each patient encounter and offering current and contextualized information to each member of the patient care team
In addition, to boost the value of EHRs over the long-term, 67% of physicians said making interoperability work was important, followed by improving predictive analytics capabilities (43%), and integrating financial information into the EHR to help patients understand care costs (32%).
