A major issue in primary care, especially values-based care, is how much documentation burden it places on providers. That means hours of “pajama time” after dinner with electronic medical records, plus hours of charting at home on weekends.
problem
Most healthcare providers have come to accept this as part of their job. However, it is a leading cause of clinician burnout.
“Another problem is that time spent on paperwork is time that would otherwise be spent providing patient care,” says Herself, a primary care provider for women 65 and older. Kendell Cannon, Ph.D., chief medical officer at Health, said.
“Many of our team at Herself Health have learned through hard-earned experience that hiring a scribe to ease the documentation burden can be a triple benefit.” she said. “Patients will be able to receive more care, have more slots available, and have a fully focused provider during their visit.
“Providers no longer have to do hours of writing homework,” she added. “Organizations benefit from economic increases in provider productivity.”
The problem with hiring scribes is that they are costly to run, difficult to scale and difficult to train, she added.
“The turnover rate of scribes is often very high, most quit within a year, and the quality varies widely,” she says. “The Herself Health team sought to overcome these challenges by piloting AI-powered writing technology.
“When I joined, they were trying to make DeepScribe available on their provider,” she recalls. “They ran into the same problems that I have seen with other AI solutions. I struggled with
Over the past 5-10 years, Canon has grown accustomed to hype that over-promises what technology can actually do. Her healthcare provider was unsatisfied with the quality of her DeepScribe notes, causing significant delays in turnaround time (often hours, sometimes the next day) and ultimately interrupting her workflow. .
“In fact, I should have simply stopped using DeepScribe and started hiring scribes, even though I was still paying for it,” she said.
Cannon has seen vendor Ambience’s AI-powered scribe technology spread like wildfire to providers at his former clinic, Pine Park. Providers love that it’s real-time, that the EHR is deeply embedded in her workflow, and that high-quality notes are produced, often better than what a scribe writes, she says. said.
“I was very skeptical of other AI solutions. It was more of a burden of documentation,” she recalled.
“I’ve also seen some of the providers who were a few weeks behind in the charts completely turn around after joining Ambience,” she continued. “One clinician actually told me that home care was difficult and he thought about quitting, but he could never go back to not using ambience.”
That’s why Canon made it one of their top priorities to bring Ambience to their own health soon after joining the company.
suggestion
When Cannon first met with Pine Park Health’s Ambience team, they suggested starting with the providers who had the most trouble documenting. She messaged one of her providers who was really in trouble.
This person hadn’t completed his chart, so staff had to spend hours over the weekend helping him catch up. Cannon had seen so many “AI-powered scribes” not working as advertised that he was skeptical that vendors could help.
“On my first day at this provider, we had a full-body documentation meeting,” Cannon said. “She couldn’t stop talking about how great the program was. She was showing everyone the notes the software had written for her. And within a few days, she was charting on time again. , and that’s when the vendor team really split.”
deal with challenges
The Herself Health Provider workflow is simple. Ambience sits on top of the Elation EHR as an extension. Sync automatically with Elation to know which patients your provider sees and start recording visits with a single click.
Once the visit is over, the software will generate a document almost instantly. After reviewing the notes in Ambience’s interface and making any necessary edits, the provider simply clicks a button and all notes are exported to the appropriate part of her Elation chart.
“It’s so simple that it takes a lot less time to sign off on the chart,” Cannon says.
result
“The speed at which Herself Health was able to implement this product was unprecedented,” reported Cannon. “We signed the deal on Wednesday, everyone was onboarded by Friday, and by the end of Monday, all providers were using her Ambience for every visit.
“At Pine Park, we have saved so much time on multitasking and post-visit documentation that we have actually been able to free up two more slots per provider each day,” she said. “Given the complexity and home care environment for the elderly, providers were typically able to see up to five patients per day, so the addition of two slots was a significant increase.”
advice to others
“This space has been riddled with marketing hype for a very long time, with companies claiming they have effective technology or promising it will come soon,” Cannon said. advised. “When evaluating AI technology, I encourage you to try it yourself before you believe anything. I haven’t been able to.
“You need to be able to pressure test your team in a variety of realistic scenarios before making resource investment decisions,” she concluded. “I have seen too many examples of AI companies delivering on their promises and then wasting a lot of time and resources because they failed to deliver on those promises.”
Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
