Daniel Derman, chief innovation officer and senior vice president of Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine, told the American Hospital Association's "Advancing Health" podcast that EHR documentation has been a barrier for the healthcare workforce, but Northwestern is piloting several initiatives using technology to bring back the joy of practicing medicine.
"They didn't go into healthcare to spend half their shift documenting the electronic medical record," he said. "Most healthcare staff would tell you that they went into it being somewhat mission driven and wanted that direct patient care. And there have been a number of barriers, electronic record being one of them as an example, that took people away from that direct patient care."
Northwestern is currently doing early work using natural language processing to create electronic medical record notes so physicians can spend time with the patient rather than extensive time doing documentation.
The health system also has a remote nursing project so one nurse can do the bedside work while a remote nurse does the documentation.
"A nurse spends about 50 percent of a shift documenting electronic medical records," Mr. Derman said. "If all we do is reduce that by a half, we probably could take care of 20 percent of the nursing shortage just by that alone."
Mr. Derman said he also views these initiatives as a recruitment tool, making Northwestern Medicine "more attractive" to a limited pool of applications as the organization is able to offer people "the possibility to have more time at the bedside rather than this [documentation] work."