It’s no secret that one of the biggest challenges for doctors in healthcare today is physician burnout. A study by the Mayo Clinic found that 54.4 percent of responding doctors reported having at least one symptom of burnout and The Physicians Foundation found that nearly half, 49 percent, of the doctors surveyed said they “often or always experience feelings of burnout.” EHRs can be a contributing factor to this. According to a 2017 study, on average, physicians spent only 50 percent of their time on face-to-face interaction with patients, committing the rest of their time and energy to “desktop medicine.”

In early May, the Advisory Board released its Annual CEO Survey of 183 CEO’s about their top concerns for 2017. Interestingly, many of the concerns were related to the subject of Population Health and the healthcare industry’s movement from volume to value. Do any of these results or  concerns sound familiar to you or your organization?

While cancer continues to be on the rise worldwide, the American Cancer Society projects an estimated 1.7 million new cancer cases within the US in 2017. Thankfully, despite this very large statistic, death rates are dropping as a result of shifts in lifestyle, early detection, and new treatment options. With more people living with cancer, care delivery often involves managing complex treatment regimens with additional co-morbidities — creating a greater need to bridge gaps across care settings and provide simplified care while maintaining patient safety.

Preparing your medical staff for an electronic health record implementation takes a lot of time and effort. A fundamental key to success is proper clinical communication strategies; taking into account everyone who is involved with patient care delivery, while ensuring constant dialogue about the implementation.

We all know that things can change in an instant, especially when it comes to patient care. Add to that having a bunch of patients to care for at a time, and prioritizing care and managing patient populations can become rather difficult.

This is where surveillance comes in.

A few months back, I attended a panel on big data at an industry conference, and the moderator asked, “What are some of the benefits of using big data and analytics?”

A panelist replied, “There is enormous value in knowing how many appointments and visits my providers have — we couldn’t answer that question a year ago.” And the whole time I’m thinking, haven’t we moved beyond something so basic? Most analytics articles I read cite the importance of big data along with its difficulties and challenges, but they don’t give concrete, practical examples of how it can be leveraged on a daily basis.

I hear it more and more from my colleagues: They’re feeling burnt out.

Studies of physician satisfaction find that doctors are reducing the number of patients they see, and report feelings of emotional exhaustion, loss of enthusiasm, and depersonalization of patient care. The most recent study by the Physicians Foundation found that nearly half, 49%, of the doctors surveyed said they “often or always experience feelings of burn-out [sic].”

 As Medical Director of Clinical Document Improvement at St. Joseph Health, it is my department’s responsibility to facilitate an accurate representation of a patient’s clinical status, which can be translated into useable, coded data. This data is then processed into quality reporting, physician report cards, public health data, disease tracking, and ultimately reimbursement. As a multi-specialty 380-bed hospital in Orange, CA, with one of the busiest Emergency Departments west of the Mississippi, getting our physicians to document has been an important responsibility.

Over the past few years at St. Joe’s, we’ve made it our goal to get our physicians to adopt best practices for documentation. Our IT staff cannot code from nurses’ notes, or from reports from the lab, radiology, EKG, or pathology. So in terms of useable data, if the physician didn’t personally document something, it didn’t happen.