Integrating electronic health record (EHR) systems in acute care settings offers a digital representation of each patient across the continuum of care—from medical history and diagnoses to treatment and billing—but they aren’t always the easiest to work with.
Too many clicks to perform simple actions and duplicate data entry are a drain on patient care. But if you can find the right EHR platform, benefits abound! Optimizing your clinical workflows enhances communication across the healthcare ecosystem, reduces errors, and improves care quality. Explore the deepest workflow challenges and how an advanced acute care EHR system can help your organization.
COMMON EHR CHALLENGES
EHRs may drastically influence how your healthcare organization operates—for better or for worse. And, unfortunately, many acute care practices still struggle in several key areas, especially:
Poor Usability
Just like outdated websites that you can’t understand or navigate, poorly designed EHR interfaces can impact ease of use. The software is rigid and inflexible.
Think of your current EHR. Do you have too much going on between information overload and visual clutter? Does it take too much time to chart or enter information? This poor usability creates an undue administrative burden, forcing clinicians to waste more time and effort on even the most basic workflows and data entry. And if you trust an off-the-shelf option, it's almost impossible to personalize the EHR to meet your needs. Catchall EHRs aren’t designed for you, so they don't factor in your needs or how you'll interact with the software.
Additionally, healthcare workflows and data are complex, making interoperability a must to streamline and automate processes. If your core systems can’t talk to each other and pull in already-charted information, it can cause errors and inefficiencies. Users wind up creating duplicate entries that cut into time for care delivery and even process inaccurate claims that later require downstream corrections, creating more work.
Clinician Burnout
Clinician burnout harms morale, retention, and patient care, and an EHR can make or break the daily grind. An effective system needs to keep clinicians moving forward and reduce their cognitive load.
Acute care EHRs generate so many warnings that they get lost in all the noise, resulting in alert fatigue, where critical warnings get overlooked. A study by KLAS found that the most satisfied users were 1.8 times more likely to be using a highly personalized EHR. Per the study’s findings, “EHR personalization is important for providers because it can enhance their overall experience with the system by making it feel reliable and efficient.”
Personalized acute care EHRs can reduce burnout by generating quality alerts from trusted sources and simplifying information to match clinician workflows.
Adoption and Training
Changing to a new EHR can be difficult because of the potential workflow disruption. But there are ways to adapt and address this. Change management can streamline buy-in and onboarding, offering clinicians the support they need to use the system with ease.
Your change management plan should take you from ideation to implementation:
- Identify stakeholders and their roles.
- Create a communications plan and strategy.
- Evaluate potential impacts on current processes and services.
- Set goals and objectives with priorities.
- Establish clear timelines for task completion.
- Define expected outcomes and methods for measuring progress.
- Offer training to ensure readiness for changes.
- Outline contingency plans.
HOW TO ANALYZE CLINICAL WORKFLOWS
What’s working, and what isn’t? Start looking at your workflows from a new perspective. A few methods provide all the insights you need to understand where to improve.
Observation
Observation allows you to gather firsthand insights about the clinical environment and interactions with patients and technology by shadowing nurses, physicians, patients, administrative staff members, and healthcare professionals as they work. Doing this helps to identify areas for improvement.
Process Mapping
Process mapping helps you document your operations—including registering patients, refilling medications, and answering phones—in a visual way. Doing so helps you identify bottlenecks, delays, errors, and redundancies.
Evidence-Based Methods
Evidence-based analysis helps you understand how medical interventions impact clinical workflows and how workflows impact clinicians and patients. It often includes interviews with healthcare professionals and patients across the entire continuum of care.
WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR ACUTE CARE EHR CLINICAL WORKFLOWS
Your acute care EHR doesn’t have to be an outdated dinosaur that clinicians dread. The most effective solutions improve usability and cut your stress levels. Here are critical functions to look for in your next-gen EHR:
Personalized Workflow Design
It’s like getting glasses for the first time: Suddenly, everything is clearer and you’re amazed at what you’ve been missing. Implementing a personalized acute care EHR is one of the most efficient ways to improve workflow and reduce burnout, but most off-the-shelf EHRs don't support personalization. Ditch the one-size-fits-all model and time-consuming workarounds:
- Tailor the EHR to match your healthcare workflows.
- Adapt your EHR to your needs and preferences.
- Make updates in-house instead of relying on a vendor.
Interoperability
Juggling too many tools—and not being able to bring them together—holds you back. Select an EHR that integrates across healthcare platforms to give your workflows a helping hand and ensure data sharing.
- Improve collaboration among stakeholders.
- Reduce ambiguity and streamline decision-making.
- Provide clinicians with comprehensive patient information.
Telehealth
Consider balancing virtual and in-person care. EHR integration with telehealth systems can give time back from data entry and redirect it to patient care:
- Simplify access to in-person and virtual appointments.
- Eliminate duplicate entry between EHR and telehealth platforms.
Modernized Tools
One thing clinicians all agree on is that there’s never enough time in the day to treat patients and manage administration. The right EHR can deliver efficiencies, such as:
- Transcribing notes through voice recognition
- Automating calculations
- Generating peer-reviewed recommendations
- Facilitating intuitive data searches
Using the EHR’s capabilities to streamline tasks gives clinicians time back for what matters most: quality care.
GIVE YOUR ACUTE CARE WORKFLOWS A LIFT WITH NEXT-LEVEL EHR TECHNOLOGY
Your workflows are the touchstone for the entire healthcare organization, and if they’re not effective, clinicians and patients are impacted. But you can take strides toward clearing the clutter, between analyzing existing processes and implementing a personalized acute care EHR.
Juno EHR for Acute Care simplifies workflows to eliminate headaches and help you refocus on patient care. Incorporating a suite of tools designed to work for you, including Clinical Content Builder, ProDash, and Clinical Action Center, Juno EHR offers a seamless digital health solution to enhance administration and patient care.
Go all in on Juno EHR for Acute Care and realize a new level of workflow efficiency.
