Philip Blanks
Director, Product Marketing
Physicians play one of the most important roles in the lives of their patients — educating them about how to navigate their care. Given the constantly rising costs of healthcare, patients not only look to their physicians for medical expertise and care instruction, they’re starting to demand more personalized, higher-quality care.
Physicians want to be able to provide the best possible care to their patients despite all obstacles, but many report that doing so leads to burnout. An Ernst & Young survey found that almost 70 percent of physicians believe that increasing digital technologies would help reduce the burden on healthcare organizations and reduce costs. More than 80 percent agreed that increased adoption of digital connected health tools that generate patient-driven health data would improve the quality of care and care coordination that they could offer. Across the board, many physicians are frustrated with inefficient processes and technology that tend to distract them from taking a completely personalized approach to managing their patients’ health.
Although technology generally increases operational efficiency and lowers costs for healthcare organizations, inefficient technology processes have become one of the major causes of burnout among clinicians. And with physician burnout at an all-time high, health organizations need to look for health technology tools that ease the workload on clinicians — freeing them up to do what’s most important: offering higher-quality care to their patients.
Providers and clinical staff need digital health tools that work for them — that understand them as the end users and their desire to operate more efficiently. For example, digital patient registration technology has effectively eliminated manual tasks and follow up for clinicians while simultaneously lowering administrative costs. When integrated with a digital pre-registration technology or EHR patient portal to collect patient-generated health data, a completely digitized patient registration workflow can contribute to a higher level of engagement among patients and ensure that user-generated errors are less frequent.
In the informed consent space, physicians need access to automated consent workflows and educational tools that handle the heavy lifting for them. This allows them to spend more time with their patients – ensuring that they are fully informed and comfortable with all necessary procedures. A digital consent solution can help contribute to increased levels of patient satisfaction and mitigate the risk of lost or misplaced consent forms.
Providers also want digital health technology that helps strengthen their relationships with their patients. Aside from the patient portal, many new emerging mobile health apps enable patients to communicate safely and securely with clinical staff outside of traditional hospital walls. Some mobile health apps even allow patients to communicate directly with their physicians, encouraging them to engage in their own care and take more responsibility in managing their healthcare journey. Physicians also benefit from being able to virtually care for more patients via app messaging and other nontraditional telemedicine technology rather than relying solely on short, in-office visits.
Healthcare organizations must begin exploring and implementing digital health technology tools that not only provide measurable benefits from an organizational standpoint but also help increase the productivity of clinical staff. Enabling your staff to work more efficiently and effectively will ultimately allow them to deliver higher-quality care to your patients.