As a doctor, I know that having more time equates to better patient care. However, doctors hardly ever have enough of it, and what spare time they do have is often spent on administrative tasks that aren’t patient facing. This time challenge is confirmed by two recent studies looking into the cost and time effort associated with clinical documentation in hospitals, conducted by HIMSS Europe in Germany “Auf den Spuren der Zeitdiebe im Krankenhaus” and Ignetica Ltd in UK “Accuracy & completeness of clinical documentation”, commissioned Nuance Healthcare.
Paper work + documentation = time loss
So, what did the survey find? Administrative tasks are a time thief that disguises itself as “paper work,” “documentation,” and “massive workload.” When these thieves gang up, they can impair doctors’ enthusiasm for their profession – and if their enthusiasm wanes, you have to question what impact that could have.
Yet every day, frustrated clinicians watch their time being snatched away, time that they say would be better spent with their patients, collaborating with their colleagues, or even the chance to finish work at a reasonable time – which is no small feat in a busy hospital or practice.
What would you do with 30 minutes of additional time?
Maybe unsurprisingly, the report found that if doctors had 30 minutes more per day, a majority of them said they would spend this time with their patients. But the report also shows something that’s often overlooked, yet has a direct impact on patient care – doctors’ inner desire to have some time for themselves. With their extra 30 minutes, some doctors said they would use it to make their daily work more pleasant, or would invest it in pursuing a work-life balance. Even something that many take for granted, like a lunch break enjoyed in peace and quiet, is desired by some doctors.
Overall, the results build a strong case for non-medical tasks to be executed more efficiently using information technology; for each minute that doctors can save due to faster and more user-friendly documentation – or quicker access to information – makes their work much easier and more efficient. Just think about the cumulative time savings that could be invested in providing better patient care if technology could help doctors work more efficiently. That’s got to be an investment worth making.
Can health IT help save time?
Of the doctors I have spoken with who are using health IT solutions to complete documentation tasks, nearly all state that they enjoy clear benefits. In fact, one of the doctors stated that digital documentation is an essential component of the daily hospital routine, and essential in making many processes much faster and more productive. Another doctor praised digital reports for their improved readability and that providing these notes and surgery reports has become far easier using speech recognition.
While that’s encouraging to hear, most hospitals still need to catch up on health IT. For many medical staff, the default documentation tool is still the inefficient paper-based clinical record, and in most hospitals, digital and paper-based documentation are used in parallel, which is a further complication that creates an additional strain on both personal and time resources that are already overloaded and understaffed.
Falling in love again
For health IT to provide proper support for clinical documentation, it must be designed to complement the hospital’s existing routines in a simple and intuitive way. This can be achieved through mobile dictation, for example, which accompanies treatment and care with the help of modern speech recognition solutions on mobile devices.
In short, the report supports my belief that in order for doctors to love their work again, they must have access to the technology tools needed to banish the disruptive time-thieves for good.
The post What doctors would do with an extra 30 minutes appeared first on What’s next.