Addressing the physician burnout crisis with AI innovations

Physician burnout continues to be one of the biggest issues facing the healthcare industry today, largely driven by the amount of time spent handling administrative documentation, staffing shortages and tedious operational tasks. Notably, 41% of healthcare providers spend an estimated four hours a day or more on administrative tasks, including documentation, contributing to one of the leading causes of burnout. However, 65% of providers believe AI can support in mitigating the hours of documentation that often cut into the “pajama time” that’s essential for work-life balance.

The question is not if AI will transform the delivery and cost-effectiveness of healthcare for providers and patients alike, but how. New AI-powered technologies, like those revealed at the recent eClinicalWorks National Conference, can drive more efficient outpatient management, improve electronic health record (EHR) efficiency and interoperability, and simplify revenue cycle management (RCM) processes. Promptly adopting these AI technologies will enable providers to give patients the highest standard of care and overcome top challenges such as employee turnover that impact physician burnout in an ever-changing healthcare landscape.

Shifting the paradigm of the patient experience

Current outpatient care processes can be exhausting for patients and healthcare providers alike, but the paradigm is changing for the patient experience outside of the doctor’s office with the introduction of AI-powered solutions. There is an estimated $1 trillion of unrealized improvement potential in the healthcare industry that can be unlocked by AI, according to McKinsey & Co. Healthcare providers can harness this potential to improve both their own role and the patient experience by automating many administrative tasks, such as appointment scheduling, subsequently freeing up time to focus on patient care. AI assistants, such as healow® Genie, can answer patient calls or online chats and provide patients with 24/7, 365-day-per-year access to vital health information and enable seamless continuity of care. These AI assistants can field patient calls with no wait times and enable efficient support in scheduling or rescheduling visits with physicians and allow for simple medication refill processes.

Additionally, AI tools can accurately predict no-show appointments, a key value driver considering that more than 80% of providers report six or more no-show appointments each week. This is essential to better optimize schedule utilization and potentially save providers thousands of dollars of revenue each year. To further mitigate no-show appointments, AI assistants can help create customized outbound reminders based on patient preferences.

AI medical scribe technology, such as Sunoh.ai, is also enabling providers to reclaim valuable time and improve the patient-provider relationship. Using AI medical scribe technology to process patient-provider conversations makes note-taking more efficient and enables better decision-making – in fact, 51% of providers believe AI medical scribes can save more than two hours of clinical documentation per provider per day.

Leveraging AI to improve EHR interoperability

Providers unanimously agree on the importance of EHR interoperability and efficiency to remain up to date on a patient’s health data, but many organizations struggle with timely information retrieval. Faxing remains a primary tool for sharing patient documentation, but 68% of providers report that the sheer volume or need for analysis of faxes make it challenging to manage. AI tools are significantly improving this by streamlining information retrieval and directing providers’ attention to the most clinically relevant information while ensuring all patient history is in a central location.

Improving the revenue cycle management process

AI can simplify RCM for healthcare staff and eliminate reliance on third parties. Not only can this make RCM more cost-effective, but AI also has the potential to establish preventive processes to avoid claim rejections, all while keeping providers fully informed of the process.

AI RCM processes offer benefits for patients and providers alike. For example, AI-powered insurance eligibility response and conversion of explanation of benefits (EOBs) to electronic remittance advice (ERA) drive efficiencies in front and back-office operations, creating significant time savings for practices. Additionally, AI RCM processes enable functions such as deep search which enables users to quickly and simply find the key information they need in claims, accounts collections and payments. AI is also revolutionizing the appeals process by fully automating the generation of appeal letters, streamlining a previously manual and time-consuming task while simultaneously improving accuracy, consistency and handling of denials.

Another key value driver of AI RCM is AI analytics, where users can generate interactive dashboards with natural language conversations with the AI-powered analytics engine. Through integrating AI into RCM processes, patients can simply understand their billing process while providers can eliminate costly third parties from being involved in the process and reduce administrative burdens, resulting in time and financial savings.

AI empowering the next frontier in healthcare delivery

AI is transforming the way patients interact with their healthcare providers and is enabling time-savings throughout practice’s workflows by streamlining routine, administrative tasks. Healthcare practices that embrace large-scale adoption of AI can greatly improve the patient experience and gain a competitive edge while enabling cost savings and streamlined processes. AI adoption needs to urgently be addressed for providers to remain competitive and provide the highest caliber of care.
 

Sameer Bhat leads the company’s sales department and oversees its technical direction. As a co-founder, he helped structure eClinicalWorks into a profitable, debt-free company with products used by doctors across all 50 states. Bhat holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communications from Karnataka University.

eClinicalWorks® offers intelligent cloud-based and AI-powered solutions for healthcare providers. We specialize in electronic health records, value-based care, patient engagement and revenue cycle management. Our software is used by over 180,000 providers and nearly one million medical professionals.