AI Doctor

CHAPTER 9Clinical Workflows

ONE OF THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENTS of the last decade has been that most of the promises about implementing digital information systems to document clinical care never materialized. Electronic health records (EHRs), electronic reporting systems for radiology and pathology, data warehouses, and other information systems couldn't show that they improved care or made patients' lives and clinicians' jobs easier (quite the opposite). Although it's better to have as much of the patient information in one place as possible, usually in an EHR, so that the care team can look up patient information quickly, the entry of that data has been a major issue. This turns physicians, one of the most highly trained and important groups of professionals, into glorified data‐entry clerks. It wastes their valuable working time that could and should be spent with patients.

The design of these EHRs hasn't made it easy for healthcare workers to easily find the most important information. Given that a lot of the information is in an unstructured format, it's also difficult to use it for analysis. That means that the promise of point‐of‐care decision support, analytic‐driven workflows, and automation hasn't come to fruition, which is disappointing to everyone who uses them to provide care. Worse, the combination of not seeing any of these benefits and having to do the tedious work of entering the information has led to disillusionment and burnout. There's no question that entering ...