Carolyn Starrett on Streamlining Practice Operations to Alleviate Physician Burnout

Our goal is really to try and make the software as invisible as possible so that it becomes intelligent and aids in decision making, explained Carolyn Starrett, senior vice president, Provider Solutions, Flatiron Health.

Transcript

How will new features that Flatiron has implemented to help streamline practice operations help address physician burnout?

You talked about practice efficiency and I immediately jumped to the end-to-end practice and how do all of the things behind the scenes before they get to the physicians. Physician burnout is real; we hear it all the time and so, an equally large if not larger point of investment for us is just savings clicks, making a physician’s day more efficient. We’ve kicked off a bunch of new major workflow redesign efforts that are specifically focused on enhancing the day to day experience for our doctors who are stuck working in software everyday.

Our goal is really to try and make the software as invisible as possible so that it becomes intelligent, it aids in the decision making, it aids in the process of treating patients and figuring out the best way to evolve that care instead of making it this painful thing where you have to keep entering data into it. So, we’re starting there with a complete redesign of the visit note experience to make that much more seamless and easy to walk through so the right information is there and you don’t have to re-enter data to get to the right treatment decision.

We’re looking at the inbox that our clinicians use and how do we just make it more seamless to ensure you’re seeing the right stuff and you’re not forced to go in there and sign off on things that are unnecessary and don’t aid to patient care and their experience. We’re also spending a lot of time on clinical decision support and how do we help our physicians have the right information at the right time and make it make it really seamless to not only figure out how they want to treat their patient but show the concordance to all the different guidelines, make sure they get reimbursed appropriately from the payer show have expectations about what they’re doing.

I think when we take a step back, we talk all the time about our number one metric and goal that we’re measuring ourselves and our product team holding us accountable to is customer satisfaction of the application. We go in and measure that and we look at specifically what do our doctors say in terms of their level of satisfaction. We think that’s really one of the most important ways we can use to both measure how we’re progressing and how it’s working and whether we’re driving the outcomes we hope, which is ultimately prevent that physician burnout and make their days easier and make them get to focus on treating their patients.