It’s been a dynamic few years for healthcare, to say the least.
The entire sector has been under immense pressure – not just for the clinical staff on the front lines but also for personnel behind the scenes.
The rapid expansion of telehealth and remote work, ongoing application upgrades and refactoring, mergers and acquisitions, revenue pressure due to delayed procedures, staffing challenges of all kinds… All have had an impact on satisfaction and overall experience.
Fatigue, burnout and frustration are already common themes for clinicians today, and the dependence on digital technology means every issue compounds the situation.
Fortunately, it can be fixed: Just ask IT.
Digital Technology and Patient Experience
The healthcare sector must take digital technology and experience seriously because poor Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is not just about lost productivity or financial impact, it ultimately affects the wellbeing of our communities.
Patient experience is only as good as their clinicians’ ability to perform their jobs. So when that job is obstructed due to a poor DEX, it’s not just the organization or the staff that suffers, it’s the patient too.
While patient experience and digital transformation have received much investment and seen significant improvements, Becker’s reports that CIOs still field complaints about ‘terminal fatigue’, the time spent waiting for applications and information, and the impact that has on satisfaction and care delivery. It’s time for emphasis on the Clinical Digital Experience: measuring how clinicians feel coupled with the behavior of applications and points of care so we can make meaningful and lasting improvements that drive better care and outcomes.
Clinicians pivot between patients and computers
Patients frequently report that doctors and nurses are dissatisfied with how slow the computers are, how they wish they could spend less time waiting for applications and information and more time with patients. ‘Terminal fatigue’ is a contributing factor to clinician burnout and turnover.
Clinicians need the highest quality digital experience to deliver the best care. Clinical applications deliver the information doctors and nurses need to care for our communities, and the performance and behavior of those applications are critical. The entire experience interacting with a point of care terminal and applications from the moment they approach it to the conclusion of their workflow must be smooth, free of hiccups and delays.
Challenges accessing or using clinical applications have a significant impact on clinical productivity and clinician satisfaction, contributing to EHR fatigue and reducing time with patients. Clinical workflow optimization is an essential pursuit for every provider, but we must also include application and endpoint performance in our optimization efforts.
Why do Hospital’s struggle to provide a strong Digital Employee Experience?
The short answer: improving Digital Experience requires the right data and technology solutions, something most IT teams lack.
The long answer: the platforms that deliver clinical applications are complex. Most of the back-end is virtualized in the datacenter, and client applications run many different ways: on local workstations, in VDI or are delivered by shared compute environments.
There are so many moving parts to deliver a quality clinical experience, yet most monitoring tools focus on the datacenter and cannot see the perspective and sentiments of critical users consuming the applications. Everything from login process efficiency to network latency and even unknown datacenter issues can contribute to a reduced experience. The primary issue is a lack of visibility on IT’s part to prioritize remediation efforts and measure the impact. Even large integrated providers admit they have blind spots with point-of-care terminals.
So how can IT remedy this structural problem?
DEX management solutions are perfect for this sort of thing: by combining Clinician Sentiment with the right Point-of-Care and Clinical Application performance metrics, IT can set a baseline and chart their impact and progress every day. Accessing this level of visibility kickstarts IT’s ability to optimize the hospital’s DEX while simultaneously improving its reputation and lowering technology costs.
Clinical Digital Experience Benefits Everyone
Diagnostic medicine begins with information: symptoms the patient reports and diagnostic information derived from tests and observation. Clinical Digital Experience should be optimized in the same way – understand how clinicians and other users feel about their experience, as well as the behavior of applications and terminals from their perspective. Only then can organizations implement meaningful change and measure the outcomes.
Fast, responsive technology benefits everyone. Total digital landscape visibility, targeted automation and two-way employee communication allow IT to do so.
Benefits for Clinical Staff
- Increase time with patients, satisfaction, and care outcomes
- Improve satisfaction and productivity
- Reduce terminal fatigue and burnout
Benefits for Organization Staff
- Improve satisfaction and productivity
- Easy issue reporting and self-service resolution for common issues
- Optimized software license spend for departments
Benefits for IT
- Total cost reduction and measurable ROI
- Proactively improve digital experience and reputation
- Reduce total software licensing spend through endpoint analysis of actual use
- Reduce ticket volume and mean time to resolution through proactive support and diagnostic information
Getting started
Every healthcare organization must deliver a great digital experience. With patient care, clinician productivity and community wellbeing at stake, it’s essential.
Nexthink has the solution—and the experience—to make it great.
Find out more about our Clinical Digital Experience management solution.
Related posts:
- The DEX Show | Podcast #15 – Tech & the Real Meaning of Productivity w/ Neil Miller
- The DEX Show | Podcast #1 – Holistic Technology Experience Management w/ Andrew Hewitt
- The Ultimate List of Digital Employee Experience Job Titles
- The DEX Show | Podcast #13 – Technologist Table Stakes w/ Mary K. Pratt and Sean Malvey
