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Diving brief:
- Nearly three-quarters of healthcare professionals say the time or effort needed to complete clinical documentation hinders patient care, according to a survey released this week by the American Medical Informatics Association.
- Documentation tasks also follow healthcare workers home. More than 77% of respondents said they completed their work later than expected or worked after hours due to excessive documentation.
- The survey comes as a number of tech companies tout generative artificial intelligence tools that aim to reduce the amount of work needed to document care in medical records.
Dive overview:
The documentation burden is a long term problem in the health sector. Clinicians say they spend hours taking notes and other administrative tasks in electronic health records – sometimes after work hours – contributing to burnout and siphoning off time spent on direct patient care.
AMIA's latest survey of more than 1,200 healthcare professionals across the country found that many clinicians say they still spend too much time and effort recording patient care.
Clinicians also noted problems using the EHR, another a long-reported challenge in the area. More than 44% disagreed that it was easy to document patient care in the EHR and more than 66% of respondents said they had not seen a recent decrease time or effort required to complete documentation tasks.
The survey comes as the healthcare industry has shown increased interest in AI generative note-taking products, which tech companies say will ease documentation burden and burnout.
Companies like Oracle, Amazon, Next generation healthcare, Google And Nuance Communications, owned by Microsoft have developed tools that listen to conversations between clinicians and patients and write clinical notes. HCA Healthcare, one of the nation's largest hospital chains, recently said would deploy its Augmedix AI scribe towards more emergency services.
Other healthcare organizations say they are interested in implementing generative AI products in the near future. A survey released late last year by Klas Research found that more than half of organizations plan to implement these tools in the next year, and a number of executives with a strategy have declared that they would use it to documentation in their companies.
But there are still concerns about generative AI products, with executives citing concerns about accuracy and reliability. Other experts believe that too rapid a deployment could reproduce the biases and worsen health inequalities.