Nurses including Paul Coyne, DNP, MBA, MS, APRN, AGPCNP-BC, assistant vice president, chief nursing informatics officer at HSS, explain how they are dealing with stressors during these times, describing how healthcare information technology can help fight burnout, but also contribute to it.

“Healthcare leadership seeks metrics to determine how to best provide patient care, and turns to IT,” said Coyne. “IT seeks more data to feed algorithms and dashboards, and turns to frontline clinicians to input the data into the EHR [Electronic Health Record]. Frontline clinicians manually enter this data, and turn to leadership and say they are burned out. And the cycle repeats.”

Healthcare is the only remaining industry of the 21st century whose primary source of data generation relies on additional manual input by a human being, contended Coyne. This human being most often is the nurse, he noted. “This technology could be in the form of a new mobile application, software enabling quality to calculate the number of falls, software for IT tickets if something breaks, new AI [Artificial Intelligence] software designed to create predictive algorithms and the EHR itself,” cited Coyne. "Every solution, workflow or company that adds to the burden of documentation to a frontline clinician has its priorities in the wrong place.” As an industry, healthcare must be better, and not settle until technology is created that does not oppose but aids caregivers in their efforts to achieve the goal of allowing frontline clinicians to spend time caring instead of charting, he added.

Read the full article at Healthcareitnews.com.