Download the white paper below
As a nurse myself, I have seen firsthand some of the many challenges our clinical workforce has faced for years. I recall challenging days when I felt rushed and unable to devote the time necessary for the kind of deep patient engagement and education that drew me to the profession. Even as pandemic pressures have begun to subside, levels of stress and burnout among clinicians remain unsustainably high, amplified by ongoing staffing shortages, challenging patient loads, an aging and chronically ill population, and myriad workflow issues that can disrupt treatment goals and inhibit the smooth continuity of care. But there’s one thing we can do, as an EHR vendor, to provide at least some relief — and that is to help reduce the administrative burden associated with providing and documenting care within our software.
I’ve been reviewing the research across a range of academic and medical journals to help my colleagues better understand the challenges our customers are facing, and evaluate ways we can help. The result is a white paper that looks at the many sources and causes of clinician stress, and the methods that we (as developers of software used by clinicians) can use when designing, implementing, and supporting our products to ensure that they reduce, not raise, stress. Of course, EHRs are only one source of potential friction for clinicians, but we should do all we can to reduce cognitive load, inefficient workflows, alert fatigue, and other contributors that are at least partially within our control.
Thankfully, I’ve discovered that we’re doing a lot of things right at MEDITECH — but that doesn’t mean we don’t have room for improvement. Our agile development processes and approach to user-centered design ensures that clinicians are involved during every stage of the software development process, from initial design concepts through completion and testing. Moreover, our in-house usability and user experience team validates the intuitiveness of both our software prototypes and finished products with actual clinical users.
In the end, we're all part of the same healthcare community and we’re here to support the users of our software, clinicians particularly. We want to be able to lower the stressors that contribute to burnout, and while we know we can’t do it alone, we hope some of the research and recommendations in this paper help point a way to a more sustainable future. Please feel free to share it with your colleagues and leadership and let me know what you think by emailing me at abrinkert@meditech.com.
Download our white paper to learn more about how MEDITECH’s solutions and strong partnerships are addressing critical success factors needed to reduce documentation burden and make work more meaningful.
