Wenatchee, Wash.-based Confluence Health has reduced EHR time for primary care physicians by 34 minutes per day by implementing both technological and cultural changes, according to an American Medical Association article.
The two-hospital system's family physicians and internists also spend about 17% less time in the EHR and 67% less "pajama time," or after-hours work in the EHR, than the national averages, wrote C. Becket Mahnke, MD, chief medical information officer of Confluence Health. He said there's "no doubt" this decrease in documentation burden helped cut family physician burnout at the health system from 41% to 26% in its most recent survey.
"While we certainly don't have a magic solution to eliminate the universal challenges of EHR burden, we have made meaningful progress in taming the beast and rehumanizing the practice of medicine," Dr. Mahnke wrote in the June 26 article. "For our physicians, these efforts have enabled them to spend more time focused on why they went into medicine: caring for patients. And for our patients, they experience the calming reassurance of having an attentive, present and fulfilled physician in the exam room."
For one, the health system started changing the language it uses with patients, from "messaging your doctor" to "message your physician's office," ensuring a "team-based focus," he wrote. Here are some of the other steps the health system took to cut "pajama time":
— Reordered message options.
— Added self-service options.
— Routing to pools.
— MyChart user guide.
— Auto-closing of message strings.
— Online scheduling.
— Filtering out "thank you" messages.