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Are Current Healthcare Tech Trends Helping Patients at the Cost of Providers?

Making Patient's Lives Easier While Making Doctor's Jobs Harder

The healthcare tech trends that have arrived as a result of COVID-19 have undoubtedly helped enhance patient care in the face of massive upheaval in the healthcare industry. But how have these current health technology trends affected the care providers who use them?

It’s no secret that burnout in nurses and physicians is at an all-time high. And, while modern healthcare tech trends have helped the average patient, we’ve seen an increase in EHR burnout since their implementation. So, what is contributing to this inverse relationship between patient and physician benefit? We can start by looking at the three most readily adopted/updated pieces of healthcare tech.

EHRs

EHRs have remained a tried example of something intended to improve efficiency, but in practice, they have done anything but. The time it takes to log into and out of each patient chart, physically type out notes and reimbursement forms contribute to physician burnout. In fact, 70% of physicians who use EHR programs report experiencing problems with the software that makes their jobs harder.

Telehealth

A recent review of several millions of medical visits in 2020 reveals a mind-boggling appointment increase of 2000% after implementing telehealth solutions. This is great for patients in need of care. Unfortunately, a study of over a million of these visits also reveals that current healthcare tech trends revolving around telehealth are responsible for nearly doubling the number of work hours a provider works during a given week.

Patient Portals

Through patient portals, patients are capable of directly contacting their care providers at a moment’s notice. This is fantastic for accessibility of care but makes it incredibly difficult for providers to “log off” after a day of work. This also results in a massively cluttered inbox for physicians. When every concern or issue can now be floated into a physician’s face at the press of a button, facilities will quickly begin to see their staff overburdened with inquiries.

What About Current Healthcare Tech Trends Needs to Change?

While it’s unfortunate that we see modern health solutions taking a bite out of provider work-life balance and sanity, rather than demonizing the current health technology trends that have challenged providers, there needs to be a shift in how these innovations are implemented.

Streamline Where You Can

Invest in hardware and software solutions that help the patient by actually benefiting the physician and their workload. Fanless medical computers, for example, cut down on circulating harmful bacteria. This cuts down on Hospital Acquired Infections in patients and helps providers by allowing them to have these computers present during surgeries and operations.

Medical computers with RFID scanners and vital tracking peripherals make logging information in EHRs notably quicker. As far as remote care is concerned, portable computers with the hardware necessary to automatically record data drawn from patient vital trackers benefits patients by helping physicians gain a more profound, quicker understanding of how the treatment is going in real-time.

Set Clear Expectations For Current Healthcare Tech Trends

It’s essential to set clear expectations for when patients can expect answers from their providers for everything from telehealth and patient portals to appointment setting and more. It would also help to take a team approach towards managing inboxes that are being bombarded with inquiries. Speak to nurses and assistants who can help providers go through their inboxes and sort inquiries that don’t require their limited and precious time. Taking a team approach at triaging questions like this can equally distribute workload to a broader group of people while also cutting down on burnout for providers who are currently tackling their newly bloated inboxes alone.

We Need to Redefine What We Consider Effective Healthcare Tech Trends

It would do us all well to exercise some patience regarding healthcare tech trends and their actual efficacy in the field. Medical innovations that benefitted both the provider and patient equally were difficult to produce before a global pandemic and shift to remote care. And while we wait for innovators to get closer and closer to better-calibrated solutions, we have means of optimizing the current health technology trends we have access to now to cushion the blow to our care staff. For more information on how you can deploy hardware to begin this process, contact an expert from Cybernet’s team today.

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