How Working Backwards from the Provider Unlocks Clinical Capacity

Healthcare COO and CIO, what percentage of your provider’s time is spent as a high-paid, data-entry clerk vs. operating at the top of their license?  According to a recent study by the American Medical Association, the average physician spends about 20 hours on EHR documentation for every 48-hour workweek.

This is not an isolated statistic.  In fact, a similar study from the National Academy of Medicine discovered that 70% of physicians reported working on vacation days just to manage charting and clear out message backlogs!

Start With the Problem & Then Work Backwards to a Solution

If health systems want to eliminate the invisible, uncompensated second shift of administrative tasks, they must shift their focus toward delight.  Before committing resources to purchasing more software, they need to start thinking backwards from their answer to this question: what problem are we trying to solve for providers?

This is exactly the path that Memorial Hermann of Texas took during a recent AI initiative.  In one department, nurses were struggling to review referral packets.  People were curious: why is this such a problem?  These packets, often in multiple file formats that exceeded 800 pages, were poorly organized, hard to comprehend and time consuming to analyze.

Using generative AI, Memorial Hermann developed a system that consumed the referral packets and summarized the key data points for the nurses.  In fact, the system was so accurate it was able to uncover details that were frequently overlooked in the manual process.  

By taking away the need for tedious, manual document reviews, the system optimized clinical capacity.  The clinical staff could spend more time delivering the specialized care and less time on non-value added administrative work.  When providers operate at the top of their license, this creates more delight for themselves and patients.

The Keys to Profitability at Scale are Delight & User Experience

But what is delight?  Delight, first described by Alan Cooper, is the feeling of joy, surprise or satisfaction when users interact with software-enabled solutions that solve their problems in a way that is both elegant and intuitive.  In healthcare operations, intuitive user experiences and workflows that reduce provider cognitive load are what unlock your ability to scale.  Without them, clinical throughput plateaus, quality stagnates and margins are put under pressure. 

Stories like Memorial Hermman are rare because most healthcare IT teams are trapped in a service center mindset.  While this mindset is good for maintaining clinical operations, it is not the type of thinking that uncovers original solutions to new and unusual problems.

If you want to bring delight, customer centricity and a product mindset to your healthcare system, let us have a conversation.  We can map out a plan to give your providers their nights and weekends back while protecting your operating margins.