A recent white paper from HIMSS and Nuance Communications shed a spotlight on a growing concern within the healthcare industry: Physician burnout. While physician burnout has been a problem for years, the COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse. Research found that 97% of doctors and 99% of nurses had experienced burnout at some point in their working life while 88% of clinicians agreed the pandemic exacerbated their feelings of exhaustion and overload.
Since burnout prevents healthcare workers from performing to the best of their abilities, it also prevents patients from receiving high quality care. Nurses and doctors suffering from burnout can experience impaired attention, memory, and executive functions, which can result in medical errors and affect patient safety.
Mental and physical exhaustion can ultimately lead to medical errors, delayed treatment, and misdiagnoses. Research published in the Journal of Patient Safety estimates that over 400,000 people die every year from hospital errors that could have been prevented.
An article published in the American Journal of Infection Control also found a significant association between nurse burnout and the spread of infections within hospitals. According to the study, “hospitals in which burnout was reduced by 30% had a total of 6,239 fewer infections, for an annual cost saving of up to $68 million.”
The white paper also found that technology could either alleviate clinicians’ stress or contribute to it, depending on its usability and how effectively it is incorporated into workflows. Clinicians felt that technology such as AI-based documentation solutions could help their work situation by increasing patient safety, easing aspects of their work, shaping clinical workflows, and highlighting aspects of the patient record.
To improve system usability, physician health, and patient care, organizations need a secure and reliable document delivery system that streamlines communications and simplifies the transfer of protected health information (PHI). ETHERFAX’s hybrid fax technology solves a huge problem for the healthcare industry – the ability to easily and securely transmit EHRs and other unstructured data with HIPAA compliance, ultra-fast transmission speeds, and guaranteed delivery all while enhancing the current workflow.
To improve operational efficiency and eliminate the time-consuming process of manually entering patient information into applications, ETHERFAX AI provides an intuitive and fast system to extract and digitize data from a range of unstructured documents and forms. Utilizing Microsoft’s Cognitive Services, ETHERFAX AI allows organizations to quickly transform content locked in unstructured documents such as PDFs and paper-based forms into structured, searchable data ready to be integrated into workflow processes, applications, or EMRs. Form type AI document recognition automatically incorporates data into third-party workflows, therefore reducing error rates associated with manual data entry.
With the right technology and tools in place, doctors and nurses can spend less time on clinical documentation and more time with patients. ETHERFAX’s hybrid-cloud fax solutions can digitize workflows, streamline business-critical operations, reduce clinical errors, and ensure that electronic health records are all easily shared, accessed, and analyzed. This not only helps patients receive fast and customized healthcare, but also reduces physician burnout and overload.
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