Seniors Housing Business recently published a thought piece, The Power of EHR Design: Staff Satisfaction, Improved Care, by August Health Co-Founder and Co-CEO Erez Cohen. Here's a quick preview of the piece:
"Caregivers face an environment that can be stressful, frustrating and demoralizing, as they shoulder the burden of demanding resident needs, increased compliance and legal scrutiny and antiquated technology systems that add day-to-day friction.
This isn’t just anecdotal. Though there aren’t many studies examining the experience of caregivers in senior living, that of their counterparts in acute care spaces is well-documented, and studies report nurse burnout as a pervasive issue across healthcare.
In particular, dissatisfaction with antiquated electronic health record (EHR) systems is a major contributor to this trend. According to the KLAS Arch Collaborative Nursing Guidebook 2024, of the nurses experiencing burnout, 32 percent cite the EHR as a factor. Within that group, 40 percent report that they will likely leave their organization within the next two years. Another study finds that nurses working in settings with poor EHR usability have higher incidences of burnout and job dissatisfaction. Even more damning, poor EHR usability actually has led to significantly higher odds of inpatient mortality and hospital readmission within 30 days, according to a paper published by Wolters Kluwer Health.
Why is the EHR causing such strife? Continuing to look at the data, frequently cited issues include lack of user-friendliness, confusing terminology, difficulty of finding or retrieving information and system complexity, according to another study. The same study describes how counterintuitive design of EHRs can break a user’s natural flow, cost extra time and effort, and contribute to medical errors.
The consequences of poor EHR design go beyond staff satisfaction and burnout. Poorly designed systems, by pushing users away, can result in important tasks being completed inadequately, late or not at all. When considering critical tasks like resident care assessments, this can lead to worse care outcomes and missed revenue. In a recent case study, this cost a large operator millions of dollars. Overly complex systems can also lead to incomplete incident reports and errors in medication records — common reasons for citations and lawsuits. And when critical data for making strategic corporate decisions becomes too difficult to access, management can be left guessing. "
Read the entire piece here.
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