Healthcare is trying to move forward; however, clinicians are leaving medicine from stress and burnout, and health systems aren’t making as much money as they need to rebound from the deficits of the past few years. How can organizations push towards better healthcare when they are already stretched so thin? By learning to do more with less.
In this webinar hosted by Healthcare Innovation, Subha Airan-Javia, MD, FAMIA (CEO and Founder of CareAlign and a practicing hospitalist at Penn Medicine) and Kash Patel (Executive VP and Chief Digital Information Officer at Hackensack Meridian Health) discussed how health organizations can continue to strive for excellent care with fewer resources.
So, how can organizations do more with less? One key takeaway is that organizations need to take advantage of and optimize their technology to make clinicians more efficient and allow clinicians more time with patients. While EHRs are a great tool for digitizing records and facilitating the business of healthcare, EHRs are not designed for clinicians’ collaborative patient care or workflows. However, people expect EHRs to do just about everything.
Other industries have a tech stack, or an ecosystem of technologies to support each department or function, and then all these technologies have a way to work together to share information. Healthcare needs a tech stack that involves tools tailored towards collaborative clinician workflows. This tech stack can be used with EHRs and allow different technologies to perform different functions, as opposed to expecting EHRs to do everything.
Another key takeaway is the importance of interoperability. Interoperability is needed to improve collaboration and to make the tech stack valuable. If people or technologies work in silos, then how can clinicians collaboratively care for a patient? How can people ensure that work is not being unnecessarily repeated? How can people quickly communicate about work in one of their silos if it is difficult to share? Poor interoperability makes clinicians less efficient and adds to their cognitive load.
A final key takeaway from the webinar is that there is a lot of hope for change. Patient demands drive change, and people are starting to realize how healthcare does not work like everything else in their life. There are lots of talented, enthusiastic people in the healthcare and health tech spaces that are passionate about continuing to make healthcare a more accessible and equitable place. Innovation, and the ability to test things to see what does and doesn’t work, can drive these changes forward.
Watch the full conversation here