Digital Health Solutions are Ignoring our Providers

There's no question that the surge in digital healthcare solutions we've seen over the last several decades (and, more notably, within the last 5-10 years) have brought huge benefit to provider groups and health systems around the world. Healthcare entities are able to collect vastly more information about their patients, improve their continuum of care and give physicians the clinical decision prowess at which doctors of old would have marveled.

But this recent wave of digital adoption is not without fault; in many ways our innovations are making a doctor's job more difficult. We're already fully aware that the use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems are leading to physician burnout across the country, due in large part to ever-tightening time constraints for performing post-visit administrative or clerical tasks. This burnout can lead to huge financial pits for provider groups, with the previously-linked study putting the cost of replacing a physician at between "$500,000 to $1 million," which "reflects the expenses in recruiting, onboarding, training, and lost revenues."

Digital health solutions have long been focused on providing picture-perfect user experience (UX) journeys for patients. After all, patient satisfaction with a provider group's efforts makes all the difference between keeping that patient life under your care or losing it to an equally satisfactory alternative.

But what about the user journey for physicians? As digital healthcare tools become more prevalent in the day-to-day requirements of a care provider, so does the stress involved with context switching between an EHR, virtual healthcare platform, decision support system, and myriad other vendor products. The siloing off of patient information between tools certainly reduces risk for the vendor whose softwares are being utilized. But it also creates a demand for added duplication as patient information is updated within several standalone systems.

The marketplace may not demand it yet, but within the next 5 years we will see a profound shift within clinical teams and how they receive new digital tools within their organization. In the future, tools will be all but required to communicate with each other and the host EHR system in order to create the most streamlined, holistic clinician experience possible.

My advice? Focus on interoperability out of the box. Work with existing EHR systems like Epic, Cerner and athenahealth to make new tools available within workflows already tolerated by physicians. Just like the music industry saw drastic marketplace unbundling by way of iTunes and then a "smart re-bundling" by way of streaming services, so too will digital healthcare solutions find their way into existing workflows to better enhance the provider's user journey.