Clinicians seek meaningful data at the point of care

Despite the widespread collection of patient data, clinicians often experience frustration when they try to access relevant data at the point of care. This can lead to a lack of clinician engagement with the IT systems intended to support their work. According to Dianne Fowler, RN, a practicing clinician and administrator at Arizona Center for Internal Medicine in Mesa, “contextually aware technology exists today that provider organizations or vendors can add to existing technology...so that information is automatically surfaced within providers’ current workflow, without leaving their EHR.” She applauded current efforts to increase interoperability among various systems but urged more attention to the issue of making timely and meaningful information available at the point of care. Contextually aware software, which perceives which patient record is open and which clinician is accessing it, can achieve this goal unobtrusively, she wrote, and save clinicians significant time while increasing their engagement with clinical IT systems. (Healthcare Business News story, 9/13/19)