Research studies have found that “burnout” is nearly twice as prevalent among physicians as among people in other professions. Physician surveys have found that 30 to 60 percent report symptoms of burnout, which can threaten patient safety and physician health. With EHR documentation ranked high among aspects of their work physicians are dissatisfied with, Brigham Health in Boston has taken a three-pronged approach to reducing the pain.
Brigham Health, which is the parent organization that includes Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital and the Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization, rolled out its implementation of Epic in 2015. In a Sept. 18 presentation that was part of the Harvard Clinical Informatics Lecture Series, Brigham Chief Information Officer Adam Landman, M.D., said the organization’s initial EHR physician training was eight hours of classroom training on where to find things in the EHR instead of focusing on workflows and how to use the EHR to support it. “Our experience was not the best,” Landman admitted. They followed up with tip sheets, a help desk and a swat team to do service calls, but providers only rated those interventions as somewhat helpful, so Brigham informaticists re-doubled their efforts to:
• Improve the EHR;
• Provide one-on-one training in the clinical setting; and
• Offer voice recognition software and training.
Landman said IT teams at Brigham feel a sense of urgency about reducing the burden of EHR documentation. “Burnout is an epidemic, and the EHR is a component of this,” he said, adding that the changes are not just a one-year cycle but must involve continual iterative improvements. “We need to be more aggressive about making changes,” he said.
He described some efforts to reduce notifications and remove clicks from the medication refill process. They also removed a hard stop when discontinuing a medication. Those three changes alone reduced the number of clicks per month by 950,000 across the health system.
They also worked to reduce clinical decision support alerts with very low acceptance rates by turning them off. Three alerts with very low acceptance rates were turned off. “If we thought they were important, we would fine tune them to increase the acceptance rate,” Landman stressed. “That is part of clinical decision support lifecycle management. But we will continue to iterate to reduce the number of unnecessary clicks.”
A year and a half ago, Brigham also created a one-to-one support program, in which an expert trainer would meet the physicians in their practice and help them with their work flow. A pilot project involved four specialties, including general surgery. Each session was 90 minutes to two hours long, and providers were offered one or more follow-up sessions, as well as optional training on speech recognition. After seeing some negative feedback on their initial classroom training, the one-to-one sessions were met with a very positive response. Almost 95 percent said it was valuable, and 95 percent said they thought their efficiency with the EHR would improve following the training. Based on that early success, the training effort is now being rolled out to much larger groups of physicians at Brigham and across the Partners HealthCare network.
In another attempt to improve documentation turnaround time, Brigham has made voice recognition tools and training available to physicians. They made two-hour training sessions mandatory for those interested in adoption, with additional personalization sessions also available. Informaticists partnered with departments to build department-specific order sets. (Brigham also started offering 15-minute e-learning sessions for residents.) More than 90 percent of surveyed physicians said the training met expectations, and 70 percent said they would be willing to have additional training, Landman said. Currently 5,000 physicians across Partners are trained to use voice recognition tools with the EHR.
Landman also cited a study that compared U.S. and international use of Epic that saw a huge disparity in length of documentation notes. The U.S.-based users’ notes were nearly four times longer on average than those of their international counterparts. Epic users overseas tend not to complain about the burden of documentation, he noted. This has to do with how the provider notes are used in billing, he said, adding that CMS is working on proposals to change billing requirements that may alleviate some of the documentation burden for physicians.
In closing, Landman urged informatics colleagues to think about working on EHR optimization research and studying the impact of policy and technology changes. “New technology tools can seem fun and exciting, but for physicians who see up to 100 patients per day, they can be quite overwhelming,” he said. “We don’t want physicians spending half their time doing administrative work.”
