Behavioral Health Organizations Can Reduce Clinician Burnout With the Right Clinical Documentation Tools
Clinician burnout has become a serious problem, threatening the health of individual providers, compromising client outcomes, and limiting productivity. Burnout was on the rise before the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has only persisted since then.
What is clinician burnout?
Generally, burnout relates to negative emotions that can result from working too much and for too long without a break. Often, clinician burnout can be attributed to outdated workflows, systems and processes within the workplace. Clinician burnout can decrease overall morale and can negatively impact client-clinician relationships within a health and human services organization
Research indicates that clinical documentation requirements, and the use of cumbersome Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, are some of the largest contributors to clinician burnout.
Documentation requirements, outdated EHRs increase clinician burnout
The American Psychiatric Association identified hundreds of unique mental health performance measures that payers may request. A single behavioral health and human services organization reports an average of 151 performance measures to different payers and public programs.
Adding to the burden is the growth of value-based care in behavioral health and human services, which requires additional reporting in four categories:
- Procedural measures
- Patient outcomes
- Cost of services
- Demographics of patients served
Many traditional EHRs cobble together disparate systems. This adds to the problem by requiring users to log in and out of multiple systems, work with different, sometimes redundant processes, and search for data stored in different places and formats. As a result, many behavioral health and human services organizations use a silo approach, generating each reporting requirement individually. This adds to administrative work and can contribute to clinician burnout.
Finding an EHR platform that supports a unified approach to reporting requirements
Many behavioral health and human services reporting requirements share common data points and metrics. Rather than siloing, organizations should employ a unified approach of identifying common data points and metrics and structuring their processes and reporting so that these data points and metrics populate different requirements automatically. This can reduce data entry, administrative monitoring, and report development.
Streamline’s SmartCare™ is a next-generation enterprise EHR platform that enables behavioral health and human services organizations to develop and implement a unified approach to reporting requirements.
How a unified health and human services EHR platform can help reduce clinician burnout
SmartCare™ manages all types of services across all levels of care in a single application, rather than trying to connect disparate systems. Its architecture, interface, processes, workflows, and reports are unified. Its dedicated data warehouse enables organizations to access, organize, integrate, and analyze their operational and clinical data seamlessly.
The result is clinicians and other users can more easily generate and access the increasing number of clinical documentation requirements, reducing burnout and improving organizational efficiency.
Streamline delivers web-based software for healthcare organizations to provide and coordinate specialized behavioral service delivery processes. Streamline’s SmartCare™ EHR platform was developed to truly integrate all departments moving them to a more holistic service model.
Streamline’s software solutions are well suited for organizations who wish to have a system that can incorporate its entire business processes into a single solution, with the ability to continue to grow as business lines need to evolve. Streamline has been offering software in the behavioral health and human services marketplace since 2003.
Are you interested in learning more about the SmartCare™ EHR platform? Request a demo today.
www.streamlinehealthcare.com
