In behavioral healthcare, clinician burnout isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a growing crisis that demands immediate attention. While Electronic Health Records (EHRs) promise greater efficiency, they can sometimes contribute to provider stress when not properly optimized. During Episode 2 of Xpio Health’s “Learn to Love Your EHR” webinar series, focusing on EHR Assessment, a pressing question emerged from the audience: “We’re seeing significant clinician burnout related to our EHR. What’s a realistic timeline for implementing optimization changes that could help address this?”
The response from Xpio Health CEO Thaddeus Dickson, drawing from his unique perspective as both a former clinician and current healthcare technology leader, offers a practical, time-bound solution to this common challenge. His approach? A focused 60-day sprint methodology that can transform your EHR from a source of frustration into a streamlined tool for patient care.
Check out our Deep Dive on this topic:
What follows is Dickson’s full response.
“It’s a great question and it speaks to one of the realities that we all contend with – both a workforce shortage partly driven by incoming qualified applicants and also by those who may be leaving after spending five years, 10 years, 15 years providing direct service. As a former clinician myself, I can really appreciate the challenges placed on providers with having to see X amount of clients, having to get notes submitted in a timely fashion, and having to deal with all of the human-to-human and emotional challenges that come with being a direct service practitioner and clinician.
It’s a hard job. Not only is being a clinician a hard job, but now we’ve also made our clinicians data entry staff. When it comes to how you can approach and the timeline required for optimization, I think realistically, if you’re collecting data on where your high pain points are in your EHR, as Brian suggested through some really easy types of surveys, I suspect most of you probably even know organizationally what are the really hard things to accomplish in our EHR in a timely fashion.
If you bring that good data to the table and we show up with that information in hand, and we know that this process takes 15 minutes to complete from end, then we can typically focus on that particular optimization issue. After about a 30-day analysis of observing and collecting information on how it’s being done today, the baseline and what needs to be essentially modified in the workflow to help improve that experience.
It’s 30 days for analysis, and depending on how many modifications are required, it’s 30 days for the remediation. So we tend to look at it in what we call sprints. It’s a 30-day baseline analysis and understanding of what the problem or problems are and where the highest opportunity is for improvement.
We collect those low-hanging fruit optimization items, and then we develop a strategy for implementing those in the EHR over the next 30 days. So, 30 days of analysis of the problem and the baseline, and the timing that we can help improve or the elegance of the workflow. Sometimes it’s patient safety issues, sometimes it’s time, sometimes it’s collecting data for a certain project or report need, and sometimes you have to question what it is you’re collecting and why.
Once those things are analyzed, we like to give ourselves a 30-day sprint to modify the forms that may need to be modified. Add the new forms – oftentimes, we can identify areas in the EHR where data has already been collected. A lot of us, especially clinicians, collect redundant data. So what we’ll do often is create a consolidated type of data collection instrument, which can pull values already resident in the EHR and pre-populate those data elements.
When you’re filling out that particular assessment, you don’t have to reenter the name and the date of birth, the previous diagnosis and the treatment plan objectives. We can pull that into a new consolidated assessment or face sheet and we can help them expedite that by simply leveraging the EHR data that’s already present. So we really look for quick wins in the optimization.
If you show up and say, ‘Here’s the list of things that we identified that need to be optimized,’ then we are tooled up and ready for a 30-day sprint to help fix those. One of the things that is really helpful about working on a bunch of different EHRs is it gives us insight into how different systems may have approached the same problem that your EHR is facing, and so we can leverage that knowledge from other customer experiences.
We’re working with a hundred customers at any given time, with 50 active different EHR optimization and data projects every 30 days. We have probably, like they say at State Farm, seen it before because we’ve been there. At the end of the day, we really want to see a 30-day turnaround for an optimization application that can give a good high-value win to your clinicians who are on the front lines of collecting this data.“
Xpio Health’s approach to EHR optimization reflects their deep understanding of both clinical and technical challenges in behavioral healthcare. With experience across multiple EHR platforms and hundreds of implementations, their team brings a unique perspective to each organization’s specific challenges, focusing on quick wins that can make an immediate impact on clinician satisfaction and efficiency.
Are you ready to transform your EHR from a source of frustration into a tool that actually supports your clinical staff? Contact us today to learn how we can help you achieve meaningful optimization in just 60 days.
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