A cure for physician burnout is better use of patient data

Somewhere in America, a physician is trying to reconstruct where their patient has been for the last six months. A hospital admission in March, a discharge to a rehabilitation facility, and then the specialist follow-up that may or may not have happened, with a medication list that is out of date. The patient does their best to fill in the gaps from memory. The office visit is only 12 minutes long, and most of it is spent on detective work. When the visit is over, the doctor returns to endless bureaucratic tasks, having spent more time digging through records and charting than caring for the patient. Members of today’s patient care continuum, like primary care, pharmacy, specialists, home health, skilled nursing, and beyond, operate on siloed, disconnected information systems that create an immense amount of inefficient work. As a result, primary care physicians spend more than half of their workday on computer-based electronic health record (EHR) tasks. This never-ending “type‑and‑click” work is a major driver of physician burnout, which can lead to medical errors, decreased care quality, safety incidents, and reduced patient satisfaction. Some physician burnout rates are nearly …