Challenges in Physician Workflow: While physician workflows have generally evolved to benefit patients and providers, unexpected challenges—such as excessive time on EMRs versus patient interaction—contribute to burnout and inefficiency.
Streamlining and Collaboration: EMRs often prioritize compliance and hospital revenue over physician ease of use. Tools like Phrasefire aim to streamline workflows, reduce errors, and facilitate collaboration within and outside EMRs, saving significant time and improving patient care.
Broad Benefits: Enhancing workflow efficiency reduces physician burnout, decreases errors, and improves patient outcomes. Hospitals can save over $900 per physician per error annually, making these solutions both a medical and economic imperative.
Over time, the physician workflow has changed in ways that generally benefit both patients and healthcare providers. Yet, some unexpected workflow challenges have come along with that.
Our prior post discussed the imbalance of time spent on computers vs patients. Here’s another study highlighting the issue with physician time spent with computer screens vs actual patients. Residents in this study spent >50% of the shift doing computer work compared to 9.4% of the time interacting with patients.
Many things need to be done to fix this issue. One of them is streamlining the physician workflow and facilitating sharing of non PHI workflow information between users. Doing this allows the MDs to focus more on patient care and less on EMR keystrokes. The thing about EMRs is they are not designed primarily to make the physician’s workflow easier or more efficient. After 10 years of using the most prevalent EMR in the US, I note the following about priorities of design:
The EMR is designed primarily to improve compliance of the system.
The physician workflow has been expanded to incorporate additional administrative tasks for the hospital system.
The physician ease of use is considered.
PHRASEFIRE was born out of a desire to improve this situation.
Our EMR agnostic platform allows widespread sharing and collaboration between attendings and resident teams. With reduced electronic workflow burden and team-wide sharing of treatment plans, burden of work and time on the physician decreases. In turn the risk of errors decreases, creating a safer environment for patients. Just 20 minutes saved per patient encounter amounts to almost 3 days saved every year.
The impact of an improvement to the burnout problem goes beyond individual physicians. Hospitals and healthcare systems stand to benefit financially. Studies estimate that reducing medical errors could save over $900 annually per error per physician, making these tools not just a medical necessity but a sound economic investment.
Check us out at www.phrasefire.com
**This post and information contained in the platform is not a recommendation to treat specific patients. The information is useful to attendings, residents and students under supervision for educational reference.
