Levels of caregiver burnout have reached historic levels, despite billions spent on healthcare technology. In early 2022 almost 2,500 U.S. physicians responded to a survey from the AMA, the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University and the University of Colorado. Researchers found that 62.8 percent of physicians had a least one manifestation of burnout, up from just 38.2 percent in 2020.
The situation is even more alarming in nursing. A Nursing Central survey of thousands of U.S. nurses showed that 95 percent of nurses has felt burned out over the past three years, and an incredible 91 percent have considered leaving or were actively looking to leave the profession.
Inefficient healthcare IT is a contributing factor to this out-of-control spending. In many industries, technology has driven down costs, but the opposite has happened in healthcare. Much of this is due to the monolithic architecture of legacy EHRs, which were originally billing systems, not designed for the delivery of care. These EHRs can’t be configured to meet the needs of local caregivers without a lengthy and expensive revision being done by the vendor.
Introducing 21st Century EHRs
What’s needed is an entirely new generation of EHRs. These could be called “21st Century EHRs,” because they would anticipate and meet the requirements for freely sharing data contained in the 21st Century Cures Act. Specifically, provisions in the law call for partnerships among health information exchange networks, educational and research initiatives, and health information technology certification requirements that encourage interoperability.
Juno EHR is an example of a 21st Century EHR. It has been designed with open architectures, a move away from all-inclusive and inflexible systems. Juno EHR is United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) compliant right out of the box. The USCDI is a standardized set of health data classes and constituent data elements for nationwide, interoperable health information exchange.
It is also cloud native, in a way earlier client-server generations were not. Juno EHR is designed to run in a cloud computing environment. It is designed to be scalable, highly available, and simple to control. Traditional solutions, on the other hand, are frequently created for on-premises systems before being modified for a cloud environment. This results in performance that falls short of expectations and higher complexity and cost.
21st Century EHRs like Juno EHR are purposely designed with the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) API interoperability standards model as a starting point, rather than trying to retrofit FHIR into a closed, legacy system. APIs based on FHIR make hospital systems more intuitive and configurable. FHIR acts as the connective tissue between all parties that need to access patient information. When this sharing is done via open APIs, the right information is available at the right time and the right medical decisions can be made.
The flexible, low-code/no-code design of Juno EHR means it can be tailored for the specific work processes of healthcare organizations. Informatics staff at the point of care can move away from managing servers and tailor their EHR for all the different user roles, programs, patient types and regulatory requirements necessary.
Every configuration change no longer requires a brand new “build.” Instead of being nickeled and dimed every time a new treatment plan is needed for example, staff can create that plan themselves. With Juno EHR what used to take two months can be done over a weekend.
We Can Do Better
The purpose of IT is to support job processes and make them faster and more efficient. That is what has happened across many industries, but not healthcare. A tool, sophisticated or simple, is supposed to make the job easier. This relative lack of support is a primary cause for the alarming scale of burnout in the healthcare field.
Next-generation EHRs like Juno EHR can start to reverse that trend and offer IT designed for healthcare workflows and compliant with new regulatory requirements. They could become the foundational capability that connects to a richer ecosystem of modern digital health applications, systems, services and devices necessary to deliver high-quality, affordable and patient-centric care.
The hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers in this country know how to care for their patients. They deserve better technology that boosts productivity and efficiency, just like other industries have done. Given the tools, they can work smarter, not just harder, to meet compliance requirements, care for their patients better and breathe a bit easier at the end of the day.
Let us show you what a 21st Century EHR can do. Stop by booth #2602 at the HIMSS23 Global Health Conference and Exhibition next week and let’s connect.
