The healthcare industry is facing unprecedented challenges that require bold solutions. Is artificial intelligence (AI) ready to handle the task? As major players in the technology sector are unveiling game-changing AI chatbots, questions are brimming across the workforce about how these tools will influence the future of healthcare.
While this emergent technology is exciting, AI for healthcare is already transforming the way clinicians are interacting with patients. Tools like AI-driven ambient medical documentation are revolutionizing how clinicians approach their work by helping them see the patient, not the technology.
Why is AI Important in Healthcare Administrative Tasks?
Healthcare professionals spend an inordinate part of their week on charting. Around 30% of a clinician’s workday is spent on administrative tasks, and 33% of physicians spend two or more hours every day on electronic health record (EHR) tasks outside of work. Medical documentation is critical for centralizing access to patient records and for billing purposes, but the time itself not only takes clinicians away from their work but is also unbillable.
While the EHR has benefitted clinicians and patients in many ways, the increase in requirements and regulations around how patient information is documented and transcribed has reshaped the profession in unexpected ways. Work previously performed by other staff members is now being taken on by clinicians, increasing the amount of time that they spend charting at work and outside of the workplace.
Administrative tasks are essential for ensuring quality patient care, but the documentation burden associated with it is causing major problems for healthcare in four key areas: staffing shortages, burnout, lost efficiency and quality of patient care.
What is the impact of medical documentation and how can AI reduce this burden?
Staffing Shortages
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the staffing shortage is one of the most dire problems facing the healthcare industry today. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 1 in 5 healthcare workers have quit their jobs, and up to 47% of healthcare workers plan to leave their positions by 2025. If nothing is done to resolve this trend, there may be a shortage of up to 124,000 medical professionals across the United States by 2034.
While the staffing shortage is a problem of its own, it is also a major influencing force in clinician burnout, decreased efficiency, and lower patient care. It is a vicious cycle that requires an intervention.
Patient care roles can never be fully replaced by AI; however, the tasks that take clinicians away from patients can. By reducing tedious and repetitive tasks such as logging patient data, staff can spend less time in front of a computer and more time focused on patient care. Leveraging AI for healthcare administrative tasks adds hours back into the day for each clinician, offsetting the impact that staffing shortages continue to have on their workload.
Clinician Burnout
Burnout was already a problem before the pandemic began. In 2020, the NIH published a report citing that 1 in 3 physicians experienced at least one symptom of burnout, including emotional exhaustion, cynicism and depersonalization, that led to reduced professional efficiency and personal accomplishment. Three years into the pandemic, the AMA now estimates that 63% of clinicians are experiencing burnout.
The symptoms of burnout can no longer be ignored; according to the MGMA, 40% of medical groups have seen physicians retire early or leave the practice entirely, specifically due to burnout. Even as COVID-related hospitalizations across the country have significantly declined, 35% of physicians said that feelings of burnout had increased exponentially by the end of 2022. This indicates that even as patient volumes stabilize, the problem continues to grow worse.
As we’ve previously addressed, staffing shortages and burnout are intimately related—as fewer staff come into work, pressure mounts and more clinicians leave the field. Can automating administrative tasks resolve this problem?
Data and case studies suggest so. While there are many problems facing the healthcare industry beyond workload, the AMA recently reported that automating clerical tasks is one of the best methods for addressing burnout. When viewed as a systemic problem, burnout originates from the non-patient facing tasks that have come to dominate clinicians’ workdays. By implementing time-saving best practices and technologies, workloads can be significantly reduced and documentation burden can be normalized. AI-powered medical documentation provides an organizational solution that helps clinicians focus on the tasks they are specialized to perform rather than data entry.
Efficiency
By implementing time-saving practices and solutions, clinicians gain a significant portion of time back into each workday. Clinicians currently spend up to 4.5 hours per day logging information into the EHR. While this data is vital for billing and record-keeping, it is also a huge time commitment that takes up a significant amount of the clinician’s day instead of allowing them to spend more valuable time with patients or gain time back for personal time away from work.
Leveraging ambient medical documentation reduces reliance on manual documentation, helping clinicians spend time on more urgent tasks that bring revenue and value to a healthcare organization. Capable of efficiently sorting, categorizing and analyzing enormous quantities of data in a significantly shorter timeframe, AI reduces the potential for human error.
Not only does AI documentation for healthcare make organizations more productive, it also provides an enormous benefit for billing and medical coding. By assigning diagnostic codes to logged patient data, it can capture a significantly larger quantity of wRVUs per patient encounter.
Quality of Patient Care
While it may seem self-evident, there is debate around whether the amount of time spent on medical documentation has led to an overall drop in positive patient outcomes. However, more concrete evidence indicates that clinician attentiveness affects quality of care. According to the AMA Journal of Ethics, “an approachable, warm, and listening physician will inspire liking, trust, and reciprocity, and that these shared psychological states produce favorable effects on recall, adherence, and health outcomes.” Both verbal and non-verbal language have been linked to patient outcomes, and inattentiveness can have unforeseen negative consequences.
When clinicians are focused on documenting for the EHR rather than the people they are serving, patient satisfaction declines. In a recent survey conducted by ConnectRN, 9 in 10 nurses believe that the quality of patient care is suffering due to staffing issues, and over half have noticed that patients have suffered because they have too much work.
Ambient medical documentation products like Augmedix allow clinicians to divert their full attention to patient needs, while notes are automatically captured and transcribed during the natural flow of conversation. Able to fully focus on patient needs, clinicians can ensure that their patients are being heard and acted upon.
How Clinicians Are Leveraging AI for Healthcare Administrative Tasks
Medical documentation is a key factor driving burnout across healthcare, and the fuel driving staffing shortages. It limits how effective clinicians can be in serving patient needs and is connected to lower quality of care. By using AI-driven ambient medical documentation like Augmedix, hospital organizations can regain control over organizational inefficiencies driving the problems facing the industry at large.
Augmedix’s products use the company’s proprietary Notebuilder Platform, which includes Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) to transcribe the natural conversation between clinicians and patients. Paired with Natural Language Processing (NLP), including Large Language Models (LLMs), and medical documentation specialists, the platform extracts relevant information from the clinician-patient conversation flow, such as diagnoses, medications and treatment plans, to create structured, comprehensive medical notes that are inserted into the patient’s EHR for sign-off.
Take control over systemic inefficiencies. With Augmedix, your organization can:
- Add up to 3 hours back in clinician’s workday
- Boost clinician work satisfaction by up to 40%, helping to reduce turnover
- Increase patient satisfaction by 35%
- Boost clinician productivity by 20%
Interested in learning more? Read our white paper on maximizing clinician productivity, or contact us today for more information on our services.