Name: Insights: Record Doctor 'Burnout' Attributed to Electronic Healthcare Records Push' (4/4)
Uploaded: 2020-07-21
Duration: 7 min 11 s
Description: The deeply flawed Electronic Health Record system in America has contributed to the 'burnout' epidemic among medical professionals.

[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: A secure, interoperable electronic health record system can save time and money and improve the quality of health care. SPEAKER 2: I'm excited SPEAKER 3: I am excited, but I'm a little nervous. REP. LYNN JENKINS: -- health records, they can better coordinate care-- SPEAKER 4: It is increasing your ability to collect data, but somebody has to put it in. DR. CAROLYN CLANCY: If poorly designed or implemented, health IT will not bring these benefits. SPEAKER 5: How many of you love your EHRs and couldn't imagine living without it? Any of you? [MUSIC PLAYING] SEEMA VERMA: We're hearing the frustrations of doctors across the country. These electronic health care records weren't necessarily built to help doctors, so it doesn't necessarily flow within their clinical workflow. And so it's actually creating more work for them. FRED SCHULTE: Doctors are concerned that they're spending more time clicking and pasting and typing than they are looking at their patients and interacting with their patients and learning about them and trying to, you know, them. BOB KOCHER: The EHR had the potential, I think, to make them more productive and sort of make invisible some of this complexity that, in fact, they've surfaced and made it, I think, more annoying to doctors. And that leads them to be less satisfied. The user experiences defy logic and surprise me for why they're so cumbersome to use. ILANA YURKIEWICZ: When I meet a new patient, it's like opening a book to page 200 and being asked to write page 201. Maybe on top of that, pages 25 to 50 are mysteriously ripped out, pages 75 to 90 are out of order, and pages 100 to 110 are shuffled. FRED SCHULTE: You can get to the point where you say, you know what, I've had enough of this and it's-- I'm too stressed out. I'm too burned out. I'm worried about making a mistake. I'm worried about hurting a patient. And they say, you know, forget it and I'm going to retire. [MUSIC PLAYING] ILANA YURKIEWICZ: I think the hardest part of patient care shouldn't be data collection or data entry. That part should be taken care of by the system, so that then we can focus our attentions on the things that really matter, like making decisions for patients and communicating with patients. RAJ RATWANI: A clinician that's burned out is more likely to make an error when they're doing their job. And what that means is patients could unintentionally be harmed because of that error. FRED SCHULTE: In electronic health records, you hear a lot of complaints over these long pull down menus, where you have to pull down and there's all these potentials, and you can click the wrong one. RAJ RATWANI: If you're a physician and you're placing an order for Tylenol, you might search for Tylenol by typing that into the search menu in the electronic health record. And in some systems, when they do that, you get 86 different results back for Tylenol. And there's some serious consequences to that, beyond just the frustration of having to look for the medication that you want. It introduces what we would call cognitive burden, which is that you have to process all this information every time and be really careful about the information that you're selecting. And that wears our clinicians out. And the second, because of that burden, is that it's very likely that an error might be made. You might select the wrong medication because the list is so complex. ILANA YURKIEWICZ: The more clicks there are and the busier health professionals are, sometimes people will just click through without being as thorough as they should be, which kind of negates the whole purpose of why these alerts are there in the first place. JON LOMURRO: The problem is is that they're just inundated with data, that they feel like it's overload and shut off the warnings as opposed to embracing them. ILANA YURKIEWICZ: --which might sound silly to people who aren't sitting on a computer all day, but for people who actually do this and would rather be spending time with their patients, if it takes 30 clicks just to order a really simple medicine, sometimes the alert fatigue can become overbearing. [MUSIC PLAYING] ERIKA FRY: Burnout is such a crisis because these professionals are-- their job is one of the most high stakes in America. They're working with humans and our health. And if they're not, you know, satisfied or engaged at work, that's a real problem for all of us patients. Earlier this year, the Harvard School of Public Health, as well as the Massachusetts Medical Society, declared physician burnout a public health crisis. Some 78% of physicians, according to one study, suffer from symptoms of physician burnout. And that's a really bad thing when we have a large majority of doctors in America that are feeling disengaged or really frustrated at work and not totally on their game. So the good news is that pretty much everyone acknowledges these problems exist. There's lots of innovation going on around the system, so developers are coming into this space and trying to build on to the existing systems to make them more efficient, to make them work better. One researcher in Washington DC, Raj Ratwani, he studies human factors. They are basically how humans interact with technology. He's trying to bring public awareness to this issue of errors in electronic health records and the need to make the systems more usable. RAJ RATWANI: So when we're looking at electronic health record usability and safety, we use several different methods to study what's happening. And one thing that we do is we use what's called eye tracking technology. And that's really important for us because it helps us understand where they're allocating their attention, what are the things that they're paying attention to, what are the things that might be distracting, and how do those relate to potential errors that might happen. We also use some technology that's physiological sensor devices. A little bit of stress is good, a lot of stress is bad, and that contributes to this burnout challenge. And so these sensors allow us to see what tasks are being performed and which ones are associated with higher stress levels. The key piece here, as we move forward, is that we make sure we keep the human element in mind. And we want to make sure that it stays human-centered, that the technology is built to meet the needs of patients, and that it's also built to meet the needs of physicians, nurses, and even other care providers. [MUSIC PLAYING] ILANA YURKIEWICZ: Progress is slow and that can be frustrating. And I think it's easy to focus on the negatives and on what's missing from our electronic records. I am hopeful, with the right focus and really understanding what the problems are, and the right leadership, that we can make progress. You know, the electronic records have improved a lot of things for patients and providers, but we're still pretty far away from a universally shared system of records. [MUSIC PLAYING] 

The deeply flawed Electronic Health Record system in America has contributed to the "burnout" epidemic among medical professionals.

Insights: Record Doctor 'Burnout' Attributed to Electronic Healthcare Records Push' (4/4)

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EHRs have contributed to "burnout" medical professionals