Wading through words: Finding the right health information at the right time

The average patient chart contains thousands of words and those words add up fast when caring for multiple patients a day. Doctors everywhere can be overwhelmed with all this data, that is often scattered throughout emails, electronic health records (EHRs) and phone calls, but what is the solution to this information overload? How can we redesign EHRs and other health care tools to support the way doctors work today? Dr. Subha Airan-Javia, hospitalist for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and CEO and co-founder of CareAlign, proposes ideas to relieve the cognitive load placed on providers.

“EHRs have been really modeled around paper charts and how we worked in a paper chart world. Obviously things are very different now. we practice in a much more dynamic way than we did a long time ago and in a collaborative way, but our technology and our documentation doesn't reflect that. And particularly when we think about how we work as teams and how we follow up on things that need to get done for patients, relying on this huge mass of data is simply not good enough and not sustainable.”
— Dr. Subha Airan-Javia, hospitalist for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and CEO and co-founder of CareAlign

Resources

Podcast transcript (PDF, 124 KB)

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