Virtual Assistants and Google Glass: Changing Lives of Clinicians and Patients at Sutter Health

Albert Chan, MD, Sutter Health VP, Chief of Digital Patient Experience, Sandra Odenheimer, DNP-C, FNP-BC, DCNP, CANS, and Lam Ho, Operational Lead, Sutter Health. Dr. Chan, Sandra, and Lam describe their research results, recently published in Health Affairs, regarding the significant administrative workload that clinicians face in the practice of medicine today (Tai-Seale, et al, 2017). For every 3 hours of face-to-face care, clinicians are spending an additional 3.08 hours in desktop medicine. Clinician burnout is a troublesome trend in medicine, with nearly 50% of physicians reporting at least one symptom of burnout, with this administrative burden an oft-cited cause. In this session, Dr. Chan and his colleagues describe how Sutter has leveraged Google Glass to connect clinicians and remote scribes to capture clinical notes in real-time, increasing productivity and improving the quality of clinical documentation in a cost-efficient manner. They also share their research from the clinics of how this has been perceived by patients in the outpatient setting, and how they addressed the socio-technical elements of implementation to bring innovative solutions “the last mile” to the clinicians in the trenches.