Enhancing Clinician Experience: A Paradigm Shift in Healthcare
By leveraging AI and promoting technology adoption, healthcare organizations can streamline clinician workflows, empowering them to practice at the top of their license.
Patient experience has long been the focal point for healthcare organizations. However, more recently, we've seen these organizations invest heavily in behind-the-scenes tools that improve the clinician experience, drive efficiency and empower healthcare professionals to perform at the top of their license.
This investment is motivated by several key factors:
- Workforce shortages: The shortage of clinicians has reached critical levels. By streamlining processes and minimizing administrative burdens, organizations can optimize existing staff, bridge gaps caused by workforce shortages and ideally increase staff retention.
- Post-pandemic care delays: The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted routine care delivery, resulting in delayed treatments and diagnoses. One of the goals of prioritizing the clinician experience is to ensure that healthcare professionals can efficiently address the backlog of patient needs.
- Economic pressures: Healthcare systems continue to face financial constraints. Investing in tools that enhance clinician efficiency and provide a better clinician experience directly impacts the bottom line by improving patient outcomes and resource utilization and decreasing turnover.
- Patient-centric approach: Ultimately, the clinician experience directly influences patient care. When clinicians are empowered, patients benefit from more accurate diagnoses, personalized treatment plans and compassionate interactions.
In this research note, we delve deeper into two areas healthcare leaders should prioritize to enhance the clinician experience and deliver better patient care.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
The healthcare industry has been adopting AI solutions for years. Some examples include:
- Traditional machine learning (ML) for predictive analytics and diagnostic support. This could include medical imaging analysis, predicting disease progression and readmission rates, and personalized treatment plans. We recently hosted a hackathon event with NVIDIA to demonstrate the potential of AI in identifying pancreatic tumors from 3D CT scans, a task that can be challenging and time-consuming for the human eye.
- Natural language processing (NLP) for patient chatbots to answer questions and provide basic medical advice. NLP has also been used with virtual assistants to help clinicians document clinical notes in the electronic health record (EHR) system, allowing them to work more effectively and spend less time on very important, but very manual, tasks.
- Computer vision solutions for surgical assistance, remote patient monitoring, skin cancer detection, medication management, and fall detection and prevention.
Investment in these solutions, as well as an emphasis on generative AI (GenAI), will continue in 2024.
What we are hearing from our healthcare clients, as well as at industry-leading conferences like the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), is that many clinicians are eager to use GenAI solutions. They realize the value that GenAI tools, like ChatGPT, Gemini and others, deliver in their personal lives and are requesting similar tools for work-related tasks.
Healthcare leaders shouldn't wait to explore additional AI use cases to enhance the clinician experience, as delaying implementation may result in shadow AI and security issues.
Personas
To identify the right use cases for implementing AI to improve the clinician experience, we recommend developing dynamic personas, or groupings of employees that share common characteristics, services and requirements.
These personas can help you identify opportunities where AI can streamline and accelerate cumbersome processes.
As an example, perhaps some personas would benefit from a GenAI virtual assistant that could be trained to understand complex medical terminology and provide relevant research articles or treatment guidelines to support decision-making.
Another persona may see more value from a virtual assistant that is integrated into the electronic health record (EHR) system, allowing quick voice commands to retrieve patient information during appointments.
Technology adoption
Clinician adoption of new technologies is ultimately the linchpin of successful transformation. Even if all the right tools are in place, their effectiveness hinges on whether clinicians choose to utilize them. Without their active engagement, efforts go to waste.
Once again, dynamic personas are a good starting point because they allow leaders to engage with clinicians and staff to understand their needs and pain points. These insights help leaders select the right tools and technologies that will deliver value to users, increasing the likelihood of adoption.
Training, support and a holistic change management strategy are also essential to ensure smooth adoption. Starting small with data-driven initiatives can help you move in the right direction without overwhelming the staff.
For example, healthcare organizations could consider implementing a real-time feedback system that provides a user-friendly interface for clinicians to quickly log experiences, challenges and suggestions.
If implemented properly, and with sound data governance, healthcare organizations can gather timely insights into the clinician experience, identify areas for improvement and take targeted actions to enhance the overall experience. Digital experience monitoring (DEM) solutions can help IT teams accelerate this process by translating end-user analytics and sentiment data into automated remediation that drives fresh experiences, increases clinician satisfaction, improves workflow efficiency, and ultimately, delivers better patient care.
With this example, as with all new solutions, it's important to check in frequently with clinicians to gather feedback and continuously improve solutions to prevent frustration, maintain momentum and ensure you're capturing the greatest return on your investment.
Learn more about empowering clinicians
The future of the clinician experience will be shaped by the strategic use of AI, effective data strategies and thoughtful technology adoption. To get started, healthcare leaders should focus on ensuring a solid foundation in data, cloud and security; fostering stronger partnerships between technology and lines of business; and determining potential ROI before committing to new technology implementations.
To dive deeper into the topics covered in this Research Note, we recommend exploring the following resources:
- WWT Presents Experts: Digital Strategies to Create a More Effective Healthcare Industry
- WWT Presents Experts: Empowering Healthcare Clinicians to Drive Better Patient Outcomes
- 5 Principles for Improving Clinician Experience and Satisfaction
- The New Healthcare Consumer: Leveraging Customer Experience Principles for Patient Engagement
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