By Rakhal M. Reddy, MD MSHI ACHIP FACHE (Adventist Health), EHR Association Liaison, HIMSS Physician Committee

This is the second in a blog series highlighting the issues and solutions that emerged from the 2022 EHRA & HIMSS Physician Committee Summit: Meaningful and Streamlined Documentation.

Documentation burden as a topic has been sliced, diced, and cooked by various organizations, and as in the story of three blindfolded men describing an elephant – everyone seems to have a different perspective based on their assessment. Although there is general agreement as to the problem and some agreement as to the causes of documentation burden for clinicians, it is interesting to see how the different groups have viewed and proposed solutions for the elephant in the room.

Ultimately, there can be little argument that the focus of the note should be on the clinical encounter and ensuring the information entered clearly captures the problem, medical decision making, and ultimately help with communication between clinicians and our patients while meeting coding and regulatory compliance requirements.

In our previous articles, we described an “as-is” exercise with the EHRA workgroup and the HIMSS Physician Committee members where one issue became the focus: the flexibility of workflows. This series of blog posts reviews the results of that exercise and describes a path forward. This article will focus on the second of the two topics: Personalizing the EHR and Understanding the Patient.

Personalizing the EHR
A common thread for “personalizing the system” is that while there are often tools available to personalize and configure the system, they can be difficult to discover, challenging to scale and share, and overwhelming to interact with in the clinician workflow. If it were simpler to personalize or optimize one’s own EHR experience, there would be little need for an organization to conduct optimization exercises after the initial implementation. After spending eight or more hours in formal training, and then significant time post go-live with practical EHR use, having some simple means available for self-configuration might remove additional hours of optimization, which will in turn reduce physician frustration.