The Evolving Mission of the EHR: Reducing Clinician Burden While Improving Data Quality

John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network, and Dale Sanders, Senior Advisor, Health Catalyst. We have reached a tipping point in the evolution of the EHR, whereby the personal and professional burden of data entry has contributed to clinician burnout, job dissatisfaction, and distraction from an effective patient-clinician relationship. Data collection is heavily weighted toward billing, reimbursement, and defensive medicine, with not enough emphasis on situational awareness, hypothesis generation, and outcomes assessment. Quality measures tend to emphasize process rather than outcome, and lack of standard clinical vocabularies, particularly for clinical orders and results, have hindered meaningful analysis. Dr. Lee and Dale explore those lessons learned from managing the clinical documentation burden during the COVID pandemic that can yield a new perspective on how EHR data quality and standardization can be improved.