Reduce clinician burnout and improve care with AI in healthcare
Clinician burnout is one of the most significant and urgent challenges facing the healthcare industry today. According to an American Medical Association survey of nearly 21,000 healthcare professionals, almost half reported at least one symptom of burnout—and 43 percent said they suffer from work overload.1 Physician burnout costs the United States an estimated USD 4.6 billion a year in billings due to reduced hours, doctor turnover, and the expenses associated with hiring replacement clinicians.2
Physician burnout isn’t just expensive—it’s also dangerous. Doctors experiencing burnout are twice as likely to be involved in patient safety incidents, including medication errors and substandard care. This, in turn, leads to a sharp decline in patient satisfaction.
Facing ever-increasing pressure to address clinician burnout, many healthcare organizations are turning to innovative AI solutions to automate tasks and reduce administrative burden. In the e-book, Breaking Down AI: Real Applications in Healthcare, discover how AI and advanced analytics offer new strategies for patient engagement and solutions to help combat physician burnout.
Breaking Down AI: Real Applications in Healthcare
Enhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, and improve clinical care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
You’ll also find practical use cases for applying AI and data analytics to make healthcare more efficient, including how to:
- Share and analyze clinical data to deliver targeted health services and improve outcomes through predictive care.
- Use operational data to optimize your management of claims, staffing, and overall costs.
- Detect and prevent fraudulent claims and other abuses based on behavioral patterns.
- Deliver better experiences, insights, and care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
Combat clinician burnout with healthcare AI
Julias Bogdan, Vice President and General Manager of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Digital Health Advisory Team for North America, recently discussed how AI solutions can ease clinician burnout.3
“AI can help automate routine, repeatable tasks so you can deploy your human resources where they are most needed. That type of automation is the long-hanging fruit AI can provide to help address turn-over rates and help reduce burnout.“—Julias Bogdan, Vice President and General Manager, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).
Bogdan added that when physicians get bogged down in tedious tasks and can no longer focus on direct patient care, they often consider leaving their current job to go work elsewhere. In turn, if patients don’t receive the level of care they’ve come to expect, they’ll also seek care somewhere else. This expectation puts even more strain on clinicians to deliver quality care.
Breaking Down AI: Real Applications in Healthcare illustrates how AI can help healthcare teams automatically capture documentation at the point of care, freeing clinicians to focus on their patients. AI can also help teams predict operational issues, track safety metrics, monitor equipment inventory, maintain the integrity of the supply chain, and identify opportunities to improve process efficiency.
However, it’s important for healthcare organizations to enable AI for everyone across the entire care process. Operational and clinical analytics solutions can help health teams improve the quality of care every step of the way, throughout a patient’s experience.
Clinical analytics solutions tap into data and analytics to improve clinical treatment processes and outcomes. For example, clinicians can pull insights from data to help identify at-risk patients and deliver the best treatments. Additionally, sophisticated analytics engines, which are enhanced through machine learning and AI, can provide evidence to help health teams make informed decisions. On the other hand, operational analytics focuses on the use of data and analytics to improve the efficiency of systems used to provide and manage care processes.
Discover strategies for patient engagement and better health outcomes
Not only does AI reduce administrative burden—but it also helps healthcare teams enhance patient engagement and deliver better care. While patients have always appreciated good bedside manners from doctors and nurses, in today’s era of near-instant gratification, people seeking healthcare now think like consumers. They expect the highest level of personalized care whenever they want it, wherever they are.
In an effort to enhance patient engagement, some healthcare organizations are deploying AI-powered health bots that offer patients personalized access to health-related information through a natural conversation experience. Created with built-in medical knowledge bases, triage protocols, and language models trained to understand clinical terminology, these bots trigger seamless handoff from a bot interaction to a doctor, nurse, or support agent. Not only does this improve patient experiences, but it also helps reduce physician burden.
If healthcare organizations want to provide top-quality care and meet patient expectations, the use of AI-powered technologies is essential. However, healthcare leaders must find trustworthy, ethical AI partners who understand the complexities of HIPAA compliance, data protection, and privacy.
Build a resilient future with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
In a rapidly evolving industry, healthcare leaders are looking to maximize the value of their investments with technology that does more. In other words, they want to do more with less—more speed, more productivity, and more time to focus on what matters. That’s exactly what Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare delivers.
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides trusted, integrated capabilities that make it easier to enhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, and improve clinician experiences. These capabilities also give clinicians connected tools and help them adopt important healthcare data standards. With our acquisition of Nuance Communications in the Spring of 2022, Microsoft now delivers new ways to overcome your greatest healthcare challenges with trusted AI solutions.
With powerful AI backed by decades of domain expertise—combined with the scale, security, and power of the Microsoft Cloud—Nuance has an opportunity to put advanced AI solutions into the hands of professionals everywhere. Today, Nuance solutions are used by more than 55 percent of physicians and 75 percent of radiologists in the United States.
These innovative solutions can help drive better decisions, create more meaningful connections, and produce tangible outcomes. For instance, Nuance Dragon Medical One, the top-rated conversational workflow assistant and documentation companion, enables every clinician to automate the tasks that slow them down. Using just their voice, physicians can create documentation in all clinical settings with this solution. Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) extends the power of Dragon Medical One to dramatically reduce clinicians’ administrative workloads and improve the quality of their documentation—which results in better patient experiences and outcomes.
“Nuance DAX is a prime example of how we are using innovation to deliver excellent patient experiences and improve provider satisfaction with technology that allows providers to focus on patient care.”—Craig Richardville, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Intermountain Healthcare.
By helping healthcare organizations improve their quality of care, we can help make physician and patient experiences more personal, more engaging, and most importantly, more accurate.
Learn more
To read stories from real-world customers and explore more ways to enhance patient engagement, reduce clinician burnout, and drive operational efficiency, get the e-book, Breaking Down AI: Real Applications in Healthcare.
1 Half of health workers report burnout amid COVID-19 | American Medical Association (ama-assn.org)
2 Doctor burnout costs health care system $4.6 billion a year, Harvard study says—Harvard Gazette
3 VIDEO: AI can help prevent clinician burnout (healthexec.com)
