What Do Doctors Look for in A Healthcare Technology Solution?
Doctors are increasingly adopting healthcare technology tools to help them save time and improve the service that they provide to their patients. Given that a doctors’ schedule is very tight, they would certainly appreciate a healthcare tool that is flexible, cost-effective, easy to use and enhance their efficiency.
This blog throws light on some of the key features that are most preferred by doctors when choosing a good healthcare solution.
Seamless integration with the practice
The healthcare solution must be modular and flexible enough to fit into the doctor’s practice. When it comes to a healthcare solution, the one-size-fits-all concept does not apply well. Today, there are so many specialties, and each of these specialties has its own requirements in terms of medical skills and software needs. Each of these specialties has different workflows and different user interfaces. Many times, the actual clinical workflow may not always follow the linear pattern as documented. If the healthcare solution is modular, it can be customized to specific workflow needs.
Enhance collaboration
The healthcare solution must allow doctors to share data with other medical professionals in the team. Physicians must be able to offload or delegate tasks of entering data into the EHR to medical assistants or nurses in the team. The solution should have the ability to automatically track referrals and consultations as well as enable the doctor to track the progress of the patient during the treatment cycle.
In addition, it should facilitate digital and mobile patient engagement. It should be compatible with the patient’s mobile device to allow patients to access their medical data through their own devices.
The solution should also have a facility for the physicians to provide feedback about the solution and incorporate user feedback into the improvement of the solution.
Easy to Manage and Improve Efficiency
Improperly designed healthcare solutions can increase the burden on clinicians, making it more difficult for them to spend time with their patients and other clinicians for diagnosis and communication. For example, if a physician has to perform extra steps on a computer, such as clicking the mouse, scrolling the screen, or keep switching between the keyboard and mouse to finish simple tasks, such as ordering a tablet or documenting a diagnosis, or writing a prescription, it certainly puts a burden on the physicians to complete their tasks, and distracts them from actually examining the patient. According to a number of surveys conducted, most of the clinicians reported that they had to spend anywhere between one hour to half-a-day at their clinic to complete the EHR documentation and communicating electronically with patients.
Doctors prefer a solution that facilitates easy navigation between menus to complete a task and allows them to complete their documentation in minimum time.
Have a Simple User Interface and Easy of Use
The healthcare solution should have a simple user interface with concise information and just the required menu options that help doctors to perform their tasks effectively.
A poorly designed interface with visual clutter and confusing user interfaces may result in the physician having to spend more time in trying to understand the patient’s health problem and may distract the doctor from his primary job. The healthcare solution should reduce the cognitive burdens on clinicians and not distract them from patients.
A well-designed EHR system presents the information in a concise, context-sensitive, and real-time data manner. EHRs should manage information flow, allow the physicians to develop a holistic view of the patient’s condition and take appropriate medical decisions.
Simple Clinical Documentation
Clinical documentation an important aspect of patient care and often occupies a major portion of the physicians’ time. The healthcare solution should simplify the process of clinical documentation and help doctors to record patients’ observations, treatment, and care plans, as well as retrieve the health records easily. It should also help the physicians in completing other documentation related billing, research and legal, and research purposes. Healthcare vendors could incorporate NLP, AI, and other cognitive computing tools to assist doctors to simplify clinical documentation.
Integration with other IT systems
One of the major challenges that doctors face with healthcare solutions is their inability to exchange data between different systems or departments. Treatment processes usually extend into long periods with multiple clinicians being involved in the process. It is very important that information related to diagnosis and treatment is made easily available to the clinicians at every stage to ensure accurate and timely diagnoses.
A lack of interoperability can delay decision making or lead to an inaccurate diagnosis. For instance, one version of a patient’s EHR may exist on one system while other EHR systems may have outdated or incomplete versions of the patient’s records.
The healthcare solutions should be compatible with other systems across different venues, such as laboratories, pharmacies, or hospitals, and be able to share their data as well as use external data. Improved interoperability across different health care organizations—as well as across laboratory and radiology information systems—is critical to improving the diagnostic process.
Conclusion
Doctors will choose healthcare technology solutions that will help them make a difference in their practice.
A good healthcare solution should help in improving all the aspects of patient care; including safety, efficiency, communication, collaboration, and timely retrieval of patient data while helping healthcare providers make better clinical decisions. By implementing the features discussed in this blog, healthcare solutions can become much more than just ordinary online documents and can help develop a deeper connection with physicians and patients.
