quadruple aim for better administrative workflow

#Quadruple aim for better administrative workflow full#
#Quadruple aim for better administrative workflow software#

Unread and flagged emails quickly get buried, paper notes get thrown out or lost, tasks continue to pile up. Sadly, most of these platforms end up creating more work as a byproduct. This is despite having dozens of communication platforms: email, EMR message centers, secure and insecure text messaging. Not surprisingly, when we asked 14 colleagues about stress resulting from fear of forgetting to do something for their patients, the stress level averaged a 3.9 out of 5. Despite the fact that healthcare is a team sport, we all are forced to do it alone. Keather and I started to realize that beyond the crappy design of the EMR, there was no system to collaboratively manage the workload. Increasingly, the lack of HIPAA-compliant corollaries to the apps that have changed our lives outside of medicine is helping lead to insecure and risky use of many consumer apps.

#Quadruple aim for better administrative workflow software#

Yet, in healthcare, we’re forced to use antiquated software and click our way through poorly designed interfaces, because HIPAA and the nuances of healthcare have scared off the disruptors. How platforms like Slack, Asana, Trello and many others have become engines for collaboration and communication, eliminating hundreds of dead-end emails. The ease of asking my wife to pick something up at the supermarket by simply adding it to our shared to-do list on Wünderlist. I began reflecting on my life outside of medicine, my Apple fanaticism, my dependency on elegantly designed productivity tools like Evernote and Dropbox. Our explorations led to three things that have been part of the software revolution in every other industry - except healthcare: communication, collaboration and task management. We explored navigating this EMR by voice, freeing up the hands of clinicians and getting their eyes back where they belonged, on the patient.

#Quadruple aim for better administrative workflow full#

Over our first several months, we built a beautiful user interface, a visual story chock full of icons, graphs and all the things that us clinicians find frustratingly inadequate about existing options. We thought we’d start off small and redesign the electronic medical record (EMR). We spent several days in clinic together and countless late nights on Zoom from Boston to San Francisco designing solutions for how we could make things better. After just a few hours together she saw the awesome re-design challenge that is healthcare and was willing to work together to build something that could bring the joy back to healthcare for providers and improve the quality of care for patients. Just a few weeks later she spent an “afternoon in the life” of our busy gastroenterology inpatient team and was captivated by the potential. Well, I though, we certainly have plenty of those. Keather Roemhildt, a veteran user experience designer from the Silicon Valley, was interested in applying her talents to problems in healthcare. Last year, I received an email out of the blue. The dozens of clinicians and healthcare teams we later interviewed were feeling it too. I was burning out, increasingly frustrated and weighed down by the “ toil” of practicing medicine. I had an incredible team of nurses and administrative assistants, yet there was no effective way to collaborate the time, effort and inability to close loops made it almost easier to do things myself. I needed help and jotting chicken scratch on the back of clinic notes, Post-Its and even a little black book wasn’t enough. I pride myself on making sure my patients and their families feel cared for and supported, yet here I was dropping balls, overwhelmed by emails, camp forms, 504 plans, orders to place and callbacks.

Sadly, some were from parents of my patients, kindly reminding me that they were sitting in the lab waiting for the orders I forgot to place or trying to book their colonoscopy, for which I had forgotten to submit the form. Not too long ago, some emails were from frustrated colleagues, asking me to do something for a second or third time. In an average day in clinic, I might see 15 patients, get 75 emails, 10 secure messages, 3 pages and 5 EMR messages in my inbox.