Can Virtual Assistants Eliminate EHR Usability Pain Points?

The ubiquity of EHR technology in healthcare has done little to improve its reputation among its users.

Despite efforts from federal regulators, industry associations, and healthcare leaders, providers across the care continuum are still struggling with huge amounts of frustration, stress, and burnout caused by interacting with EHR tools on a daily basis.

Many industry leaders place the onus on health IT developers and EHR vendors to improve EHR usability and create new technologies that ease the burden of clinical documentation - and to their credit, vendors are working diligently to simplify the EHR interface and develop user-friendly products.

But cutting down on clicks only solves some of the usability problem. Getting data out of the EHR is just as difficult as putting data in.

Patient health information is often buried in lengthy medical records, making it difficult to absorb important data in a timely manner. The time and cognitive effort required to learn everything a provider needs to know about every patient can eat into the very limited window they have to actually speak with the individual and collaborate on care.

Ultimately, clinicians need more than a sleeker interface. They want a fundamentally different way to manage, retrieve, enter, and apply information available in patient EHRs to clinical care.