Apple Watches, AI help docs dictate at Austin Regional, saving 2 hours a day

Austin Regional Medical Clinic, a multispecialty medical group serving central Texas, provides primary and specialty healthcare to more than 475,000 area residents in 25 locations across ten cities. The group practice wanted to improve patient engagement and reduce physicians’ time entering data into its Epic electronic health record.

THE PROBLEM

Physicians today are challenged by working in electronic health records, said Dr. Manish Naik, chief medical information officer at Austin Regional.

“The user interface is suboptimal and clunky, leading to increased cognitive load,” he said. “Physicians are acting as the most highly trained data entry clerks in the world to complete many of their EHR workflows. To cope with these challenges, physicians have begun to bring the EHR into the exam room with their patients, taking focus away from the patient.”

Austin Regional had been searching for a solution that could help reduce the clerical burden on physicians, introduce efficiencies into their interactions with the EHR, and allow them to focus more on patients.