How connected care tech can boost provider experience

The advent of technology in the healthcare landscape sparked new and exciting changes to the traditional care delivery model. However, in many ways, the rise of healthcare technology created distance between patients and their healthcare providers due to the increased burden these technologies placed on physicians.

At the Connected Health 2024 virtual summit, Michael Oppenheim, M.D., senior vice president of clinical digital solutions at Northwell Health, illustrated this point through a drawing published in the Journal of the American Medical Association about a decade ago.

The drawing depicts a doctor's visit. A child sits on the exam table in the center of the room with his parents and younger sibling to his right and the physician to his left, with his back to the patient and family.

"You get that sense of that separation between the clinician and the patient," Oppenheim said during a keynote presentation. "And that's what the current state-of-the-art technology, electronic health records and other technologies, are perceived to have done, and I think, [what they] largely have done is they've created this huge administrative burden for clinicians with things that have to be charted, things that have to be looked at, information that has to be gleaned from elsewhere, communication all centered around the computer in a way, becoming a distraction from what should be the focal point of the clinician and patient interacting with each other."

As technology advances and further integrates into the U.S. healthcare system, healthcare provider organizations must ensure that technology implementation does not drive a wedge in the patient-provider relationship. Oppenheim noted that this will require organizations to reduce the administrative burden associated with these technologies and expand the ways patients and their care teams can connect.

During the presentation, Oppenheim detailed Northwell Health's strategies for enhancing the clinician experience as technology adoption grows.

Using tech to enhance healthcare access

Connected healthcare technologies can significantly expand access to healthcare. While expanded access is necessary to improve population health, it can place new and arduous burdens on clinicians.

"An average doc can have a panel of 3,000 to 4,000 people, [and] someone they haven't seen in three or four months, they [might] message with a complaint or a question," Oppenheim explained. "Every touch with a patient -- from a simple phone message to an in-person visit -- requires that you get up-to-date and up-to-speed on that patient."

This time-consuming process can lead to numerous inefficiencies in the health system. Because it is difficult to keep track of each patient and their needs, a physician might end up seeing a patient that requires care outside their scope of practice.

"As an example, I'm an infectious disease physician, but just because of the rapidity of change around HIV medicine, given that I'm primarily administrative, I don't have the time to keep up with the constantly emerging new treatments and treatment paradigms for HIV," Oppenheim said.

In this case, it would be better for the patient to see a physician who has expertise in delivering HIV care.

Northwell Health is using various technology-based capabilities -- including mapping tools, propensity analyses and nearest-neighbor match features -- to build physician profiles and help patients find the right physicians for their medical needs. By ensuring patients are connected to the right physician, there are fewer instances where physicians' valuable time is wasted in getting patients the access they need.

Exploring the benefits of generative AI

As AI technology makes inroads into nearly every U.S. industry, healthcare providers and researchers are examining its use in various clinical care areas.

Northwell Health is using AI-based chart summarization tools to support providers managing growing patent volumes.

"In this digital day and age, patients have huge volumes of data that are electronic," Oppenheim said. "It is very time-consuming to review all of that at a transition of care. Or if you haven't seen me in a year, many, many doctors do what's called chart prep days. The night before they're going to see a [patient], they spend literally hours, literally reading through all the interval history.... And this is where prior technology has really fallen down."

Healthcare providers want to see only the clinically meaningful information relevant to the care they are providing. Oppenheim noted that the data an infectious disease physician wants on a patient is likely different from the data a cardiologist needs.

"It became what I call the Goldilocks problem, right?" Oppenheim said. "I don't want too much [data]. I don't want too little. It has to be just right."

Though there are several valid concerns regarding AI use in healthcare, generative AI is proving immensely useful in summarizing and contextualizing data for different types of providers, making it actionable.

It became what I call the Goldilocks problem, right? I don't want too much [data]. I don't want too little. It has to be just right.

Oppenheim illustrated this with an example. In an experiment to test the use of generative AI in this area, Oppenheim asked AI to write a summary of two successive hospitalizations of a complicated patient.

"It's a patient that I was seeing who had a pancreatic mass. They had obstruction of their bile ducts. As a result, they had abnormalities in the lymph nodes of their chest and their lungs, which they thought was an infection. So multiple, multiple issues here," he said. "But what was really impressive was [the tool's] ability to summarize these two hospitalizations, and you'll have to take my word for it ... It did an amazing job of picking up what were the most important things."

Not only that but ambient listening is also proving effective in reducing clinical administrative burdens.

Oppenheim explained that ambient listening tools record and summarize the clinical consultation into a clinical note. This saves physicians time they would have typically spent manually documenting during the appointment, allowing them to focus on the patient instead.

"You are 100% laser-focused," he said. "You're not like that kid's picture where you're typing on a screen over here, and the patient is all the way over there, but you're focused on the patient. You're having your normal back-and-forth conversation."

These tools also give physicians time to see more patients or complete tasks in their professional and personal lives since they no longer need to spend hours documenting the appointment afterward or at home.

Supporting team-based care

Team-based care is vital to enhancing patient outcomes and experience. Ensuring the various groups involved in patient care can communicate easily with each other is an age-old challenge in healthcare settings.

"In a hospital setting, you may have the primary team, you may have a bunch of specialists, you have the nurses, you have social workers who are helping with discharge. How do we keep [them] all on the same page?" Oppenheim said. "It's a complex socio-technical problem to coordinate all of our activities, all of our thinking, all of the disciplines, all the different specialties."

Advanced connected healthcare technology can support team-based care by allowing quick and seamless communication across clinical teams. Oppenheim noted that some new EMRs support cross-team communication by including team chat functionalities. These functionalities allow different members of the patient's care team, including physicians, nurses and social workers, to discuss the patient's medical needs and treatment plan.

"We want to not only bring the clinicians together to make a plan, but we bring the clinicians together to discuss what we think are the viable options because we don't want to present an option that we know is doomed to fail," Oppenheim said. "And then you can bring the patient into the communication loop and say, 'Okay, here's the two options.' So really, really powerful for, again, creating that connectedness and moving the patient journey along."

However, Oppenheim noted the urgent need for more tools that offer integrated communication functionalities rather than point solutions.

Connected health technology will continue to advance as patient needs evolve. Amid the ongoing digitization of healthcare, organizations must ensure that the clinician experience is not compromised, as provider buy-in and clinician satisfaction can make or break technology adoption efforts.

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers the virtual healthcare landscape, including telehealth, remote patient monitoring and digital therapeutics.