What is a Smart EHR UI, and why do clinicians need them?

by | Dec 1, 2022

In a recently released Gartner® report, Hype Cycle™ for Digital Care Delivery Including Virtual Care, 2022*, authored by Sharon Hakkennes and Veronica Walk, and published 9 July 2022 (ID G00768917), the category-creating research firm cited the Smart EHR UI as an emerging innovation with a high benefit rating for CIOs and less than 1% of market penetration.

According to the report, Smart EHR UI offerings improve usability and reduce the time and effort to find, access, and share relevant clinical information, which helps to greatly reduce EHR-induced clinician burnout. Smart EHR UI solutions offer healthcare provider organizations a way to improve EHR usability without significant time or resource requirements from internal IT departments or EHR vendors. These solutions integrate with EHRs primarily through fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) APIs, resulting in shorter implementation timelines and minimal integration costs. The adoption of FHIR interoperability standards is lowering the bar for vendors seeking to integrate with EHRs.

The Gartner report highlights the need for the C-suite to look into Smart EHR UI solutions: “As EHR adoption continues to grow and interoperability initiatives accelerate, the volume and complexity of clinical data clinicians must navigate become increasingly challenging. EHR data is usually organized chronologically in complex and non-standard hierarchies and is presented without consideration for clinical relevance or context. We expect increased adoption of smart EHR UI solutions to solve the growing complexity and volume of clinical data.”

Wellsheet was featured in the Smart EHR UI category in this Gartner report and leads this market, addressing all Smart EHR UI criteria but also providing much-needed real-time collaboration and communication support for clinical workflows like handoff, rounding, and notifications. Deploying Wellsheet alongside a Cerner, Epic or athenahealth EHR results in more efficient care delivery, which can impact patient throughput and length of stay. Wellsheet deploys in weeks and training takes only minutes. With Wellsheet, clinicians immediately experience a modern EHR experience and increased EHR satisfaction and measurable productivity gains.

 

Why is a Smart EHR UI Important?

The Gartner report states, “EHRs consistently perform poorly on system usability scales (SUS), with acceptability ranging from low marginal to not acceptable. Poor EHR usability is strongly associated with clinician burnout, which is a prevalent and serious problem for healthcare provider organizations. Smart EHR UI solutions can improve usability and mitigate clinician burnout by reducing the time and effort to find relevant clinical information within the EHR.”

According to the Gartner report, “through the deployment of Smart EHR UI solutions, healthcare providers will:

  • Increase clinician productivity and capacity by reducing time spent on chart review and searching for relevant clinical data.
  • Improve the total experience of patients and clinicians by maximizing the patient-clinician interaction, whether conducted virtually or in person.
  • Enable clinicians to make more informed decisions and reduce errors of omission by elevating relevant data that might otherwise be overlooked.”

“Healthcare providers are taking a multi-pronged approach to address the many contributing factors to clinician burnout, including the EHR. Clinician burnout has been exacerbated by pandemic conditions and has suffered from and contributed to unprecedented healthcare workforce shortages. Minimizing the burden on the care team and preventing further attrition or out-migration from the industry is a top priority in most healthcare provider organizations.”

Wellsheet pioneered the Smart EHR UI, and is deployed enterprise-wide with thousands of clinicians using it daily to reduce their time in the EHR, which improves job satisfaction and reduces burnout and worker turnover for physicians, nurses, and care managers. Burnout, turnover, and clinician migration have contributed to financial instability on top of the pandemic’s impact on the bottom line for healthcare providers.

Wellsheet’s Smart EHR UI harnesses machine learning predictive models to anticipate physicians’ workflow needs, surfacing the most relevant clinical data based on their specialty and workflow habits. Wellsheet is engaged with some of the largest healthcare providers in the private and public sector and has been deployed across large healthcare systemspayers, and community health centers. In addition, Wellsheet has been proven to reduce time spent by physicians in the EHR.

Read the following case study about Wellsheet’s enterprise-wide deployment at RWJBarnabas Health and how Wellsheet reduced time in the EHR and clinician burnout.

To learn more about how you can deploy Wellsheet’s Smart EHR UI, reduce clinician burnout and impact your bottom line, watch this video or sign up for a 1:1 demo and ROI analysis.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like more information on Wellsheet or an introduction to Craig Limoli, the company’s founder and CEO.

*GARTNER and HYPE CYCLE are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Published December 1, 2022
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