Clinician burnout is one of the greatest challenges facing the healthcare industry today, but applying human-centered design to clinical IT experiences may be able to reduce that burnout.
Two healthcare experts offered their insights on solving the problem during a May 10 panel at the Becker's Hospital Review Health IT + Clinical Leadership 2018 conference in Chicago. Rasu Shrestha, MD, chief innovation officer of Pittsburgh-based UPMC, and Santosh Mohan, head of athenahealth's More Disruption Please Labs, were the panelists.
Here are four insights from Dr. Shrestha and Mr. Mohan:
1. It’s "not just about building applications and writing code," said Dr. Shrestha. "Design thinking mandates you start first at empathy. You've got to really sit down and put yourself in the mind of the end user."
2. "This is absolutely about figuring out how we can provide better experience proactively instead of reactively—understanding the expressed and unexpressed needs of clinicians before logging in our service, and most importantly, doing it with empathy."
3. "The mindset change will come from… actually leveraging these zeroes and ones in ways we haven't used them before," said Dr. Shrestha. "It's not about taking a folder and a file and turning them into e-folders and e-files, it's about changing our mindsets.
4. "Think about what your business objectives are. You look and see where in the IT journey is the risk of not hitting business objectives and where you can improve it," said Mr. Mohan. "Speak to end users, unearth their story, find out where it could hurt business objectives, and pick a moment to fix that. Then finally you say: Here's the solution, and here's how it will fix our problem."