Digital health plays an increasingly important role in the practice of medicine, regardless of a physician's age, location or specialty. Understanding physicians' concerns and satisfying their user preferences is key to realizing technology's potential to improve physicians' professional lives through reduced administrative burden, increased patient face time and more effective clinical care.
This article is sponsored by Lenovo
Digital technologies have promised physicians faster and more meaningful ways of interacting with their colleagues and patients. Yet most physicians are skeptical when organizations introduce new tech — and for good reason. Some technology systems that were intended to improve organization and user efficiency, like EHRs, have inadvertently complicated provider workflows and contributed to physician burnout largely due to design and workflow issues.
Physicians may be frustrated with some health IT, but they are extremely optimistic when it comes to adopting digital health tools they believe will improve clinical practices. Physicians are drawn to digital technologies that could improve work efficiency (82 percent), increase patient safety (80 percent) and improve their diagnostic ability (79 percent), according to a 2016 American Medical Association study.
Well-designed health IT goes one step beyond merely taking an administrative task off a physician's plate; it augments physicians' clinical abilities to serve more patients and deliver high-quality care.
Twenty-nine healthcare leaders examined the issues physicians face with new technology and solutions to those challenges during a roundtable discussion May 11 at Becker's Hospital Review's Health IT + Clinical Leadership Conference. Senior Solution Architect Andy Bartley from Intel and Lenovo Health Solution Managers Andy Nieto and Wyatt Yelverton led the discussion.
It didn't take long for an important theme to emerge. Executives agreed: It's time to start accounting for the physician perspective throughout the design, testing and implementation of new tech.
Making new technologies succeed at your organization
So what does "designing with the physician in mind" look like? Here are five key ways healthcare organizations and their IT partners can design and implement technology that empowers and facilitates clinical practice, as discussed in the conference session.
1. Know physicians' qualms with existing solutions to identify their needs. Some leaders — such as the assistant vice president of nursing practice at a large academic health system in the South — are proactively weeding out physicians' biggest challenges with tech. For example, her organization is looking at physicians' greatest pain points in using EHRs and the effects on their work lives — like when physicians take their work home with them — to quickly address their challenges with targeted training sessions or peer-backed advice. The right analytics tools and informatics support are critical when taking this approach, however.
2. Design intuitive solutions and make their value obvious. When new tech moves into healthcare, it must be packaged in an appealing and intuitive way, according to the CMO of a global management consulting firm. Vendors should begin to tailor their products to the specific user group they are marketing to, instead of showing off their tools' plug-in-play capabilities. "When you come to me as the physician, show me what it is that I am getting from you, so I see a value in [it] … If it is going to take me an hour or two to learn it, that's OK because now I know where I am going," the CMO said. In other words, physicians want to immediately recognize the ROI on any new tool.
3. Observe physicians while they use the tech to inform its design and functionality. During the roundtable discussion, most leaders agreed that it is time for emerging technologies to be designed with the end user in mind. The CIO of an integrated healthcare delivery system serving a large metropolitan area in the Midwest suggested technologists spend more time observing providers firsthand as they use their tools. Instead of bombarding them with questions or expecting them to bring up their toughest pain points, IT departments and vendors should take time to identify gaps in physician efficiency within existing technologies before developing new products.
4. Count on physician leaders to help drive satisfaction with a new tech. Gaining the support of a physician leader for new initiatives is not a given, but technology advisory councils are promising means of building trust and engagement with clinical teams, Mr. Bartley said. Physicians value an opportunity to proactively deliver feedback to IT leadership before purchasing decisions are made. One way to elicit physician participation is to ask them to serve rolling appointments on the technology advisory council.
5. Ask if every new technology serves the organization's goals. Healthcare organizations should consider their long-term goals, as well as their short-term ones, and align those ideas with technologies. For the CMO of a physician-owned acute care practice in the West, this involves a human solution to the way physicians interface with technology. His organization is training scribes — mostly recent undergraduates who are taking a year or two off before entering medical school — to alleviate some of physicians' documentation burdens. As voice recognition technology evolves, his organization plans to transition those scribes to other roles, such as patient navigators.
As the industry advances, tech companies and healthcare organizations alike need to invest more time and resources into learning how their products are being used and applied in the clinical setting. The five tips laid out in this report can help inform the design and introduction of new solutions to earn physicians' stamp of approval.
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