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Avoiding Doctor Burnout, EHR Optimisation, AI and Security

UK health tech predictions 2019

The healthcare industry is making the enormous transition to a fully digital future. Nuance invited past March to a global meeting gathering 200 professionals from all over the globe to connect with specialists, peers, and related industry colleagues to help hospitals and healthcare systems adapt to a new paradigm.

Focused on the future of voice-driven clinical documentation – and featuring high-profile speakers including John Rayner, Regional Director, HIMSS Analytics and Olivier Boussekey, CIO, GH Paris Saint Joseph, France – the event armed attendees with the expertise and knowledge to succeed where the need for change meets resistance in the healthcare market.

Nuance has identified doctor burnout, electronic health record (EHR) optimisation, artificial intelligence (AI) and security as the key trends during the conference.

The conference examined the pressing issues affecting the healthcare industry across Europe and beyond, educating healthcare leaders as to how the industry can adapt to a new, digital-first paradigm, offering a unique opportunity for healthcare professionals to discover new and improved clinical documentation solutions and speech recognition services, and find out how to improve the overall patient experience through the adoption of dedicated technology.

Doctor burnout

Recent Nuance research has revealed that healthcare professionals spend more than 50 per cent of their working day creating, reviewing and updating clinical documentation.

Frederik Brabant added: “The UK is suffering with growing doctor dissatisfaction and large numbers of healthcare professionals leaving the industry or retiring; it is clear that we must look for ways to address this issue, with technology set to take centre-stage.”

Electronic Health Record (EHR) Optimisation

Further research in the UK has found that the vast majority of NHS workers are still reliant in some way on pen and paper to build patient records, with 93 per cent of NHS Trusts admitting staff still handwrite patient reports.

A new EHR study conducted by HIMSS Analytics and commissioned by Nuance, found that the majority of healthcare leaders are trying to improve EHR adoption as well as doctor satisfaction with them. While 83% have confidence that their organisation will realise the intended benefits of the technology, the transition to digital records has come at a cost both in healthcare staff dissatisfaction and in added staff and resources to improve EHR adoption.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents many opportunities to improve a doctor’s performance and overall wellbeing. AI can be a game changer for physicians by working in the background to sift through records and criteria or complex requirements so physicians can get to action more quickly. This frees them up to have more time with patients. In fact, we’ve seen huge gains in AI in healthcare that delivers 45% faster clinical documentation and can improve their quality scores up to 36%.

Frederik Brabant said: “While AI is the buzzword of today, the technology has been around for decades, and Nuance researchers have been driving huge advances in R&D especially recently with deep neural nets. We believe AI will deliver more insights at the point of care, more facts and evidence to doctors in real time so they can spend more time counselling patients, discuss care plans, medication adherence and recommendations.”

Security

Safeguarding patient data is critical for every healthcare organisation, and this requires significant investment, resources and specialist expertise. With connected devices entering hospitals, patient data being digitised and the government’s paperless NHS commitments getting closer to the fore, ensuring data is protected has never been more paramount.

Frederik Brabant, MD

About Frederik Brabant, MD

Frederik Brabant, MD is Chief Medical Information Officer at Nuance where he is in charge of the European healthcare market strategy. He joined the team in 2006 and has focused on bringing innovative speech recognition and coding solutions to the healthcare market in a variety of roles ranging from product management to marketing, both in EMEA and North America. He is a medical doctor specializing in sports medicine, holds an engineering degree, and successfully completed the International Management Program at the Vlerick Business School in Brussels.