Digital Solutions to Solve Clinical Burnout?

I attended the Healthcare Infrastructure Showcase: Digital & Patient Experience in downtown Toronto on September 26th, 2024. This conference had two different conference tracks: Digital Health and Patient Experience.

Some interesting talks were given, including a talk on how Estonia is approaching digital health. You can watch a video here on how they are approaching healthcare interoperability and how the government is taking a primary role in incorporating digital health vendors into their nationwide system. There was also a talk given on the use of synthetic health data and how it can be segmented by specific disease type so that research can be directly applied, for richer results (e.g., synthetic data for kidney diseases can be used by the nephrology department).

One of the common themes of this conference was the advent of ambient listening being used to help reduce clinical documentation burden. Epic and Microsoft have recently partnered to create an AI scribe (i.e., DAX Copilot embedded in Epic) which automates the creation of clinical notes. Not to be outdone, Oracle Health has also launched similar technology through the Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant which can be embedded in Oral Health EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems.

When I think of the advent of this technology I think of the challenges, risks and benefits of implementing this into our existing healthcare infrastructure. One of the quotes I heard that has stayed with me from the conference was: “the importance of buy-in vs. engagement”. Engagement is key because you are involving people in the project from the beginning and taking them along the journey vs. surveying stakeholders to see if they agree with implementing this technology, where you technically have their “buy-in”.

With current EHR systems being cited for being one of the factors for clinician burnout, this might be because one of the primary purposes for this design was for billing purposes and not to reduce the burden of documentation for the clinician. I think in the future if we want to see ambient listening being used in a wide-scale manner we need to ensure to involve clinicians early on in the design and get their opinions on the interface that they will regularly be interacting with. I look forward to seeing how this technology could potentially reduce documentation burden for the clinician and improve patient outcomes.