EHR use has grown in the last ten years because of federal support like the HITECH Act. Still, many doctors and nurses find these systems hard to use. Traditional EHRs need a lot of clicking, searching, and changing screens. This interrupts work and takes time away from patients. Often, these systems seem made more for billing and rules than for actual patient care.
David Karger, an AI researcher at MIT, says many current systems do not help clinicians well. They make users look through many unrelated pages and notes. This slows down decisions. Medical practice leaders and IT managers in the U.S. feel pressure to find solutions that fit better with how clinicians work and reduce paperwork.
Health informatics helps improve how patient data is gathered, saved, found, and used. It combines knowledge from nursing, data science, and analytics to turn raw data into useful information. This helps doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and insurance people get access to medical records quickly.
Research by Mohd Javaid, Abid Haleem, and Ravi Pratap Singh shows health informatics helps improve medical practice management. It lets healthcare workers and patients share data fast. This supports teamwork and personalized care plans. Inside U.S. practices, it helps organizations manage information well, helping decisions in clinical and office work.
Health informatics also helps deal with problems like missing data, slow access, and scattered records. Using standard electronic systems, practice leaders can make sure patient data is ready during visits. This helps clinicians make better judgments and reduces mistakes.
One example of a new idea is MedKnowts. It is an AI-based EHR system made by MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. MedKnowts shows only the patient data relevant to the clinician’s current work, putting many functions into one screen.
MedKnowts has several main features:
During its test in the emergency department at Beth Israel, MedKnowts got a usability score of 83.75 out of 100 from clinicians. Scribes liked the autocomplete feature because it sped up documentation. This AI system solved the problem of doctors wasting time jumping through pages and looking for data. It reduces mental effort while keeping patient safety.
Future plans for the project include improving machine learning to show the most relevant records. It also aims to customize screens for different types of doctors, such as those in primary care and specialty clinics, not just emergency rooms.
Electronic medical records (EMRs), part of health informatics, are very important for better healthcare. EMRs let all team members see and update patient information at the same time.
Having electronic access helps with:
For administrators and IT staff, supporting good electronic access means buying reliable systems and training users well. It also means keeping data safe and following HIPAA rules to protect patient privacy.
Artificial intelligence can do more than organize data—it can also automate repeated and routine tasks. This helps both clinicians and office staff.
Companies like Simbo AI work on AI systems for phone answering and patient interactions in medical offices. These systems handle appointment scheduling, patient sorting, and common questions. This helps front-desk staff by reducing call workload, allowing faster answers to patients and more time for in-person work.
AI uses speech recognition and language processing so doctors can speak their notes instead of typing. This saves time and lets doctors focus more on patients. MedKnowts includes autocomplete features based on clinical language that helps speed up note-taking without losing accuracy.
Advanced AI can analyze patient data in real time while clinicians work. It points out trends, unusual results, or past diagnoses. This helps clinicians find important information quickly. This support lowers mental load and helps with faster diagnosis and treatment decisions.
Such automation can improve:
Even though AI and health informatics help a lot, using them in U.S. healthcare has difficulties.
Healthcare workers get used to old EHR systems and may resist new ones like MedKnowts. Training and support are needed to help them accept and use new tools. The Covid-19 pandemic made in-person training hard, which slowed adoption.
Data security and working well with other systems are big concerns. Systems must follow strict laws like HIPAA to protect data. Also, new AI tools must work with old systems so that data is not stuck in one place.
Different types of doctors need different features. One system does not fit all, so tools must be flexible enough for primary care doctors, emergency room physicians, specialists, and others who work differently.
Practice leaders and IT managers in the U.S. have an important job picking and running technology that helps clinicians.
They should consider:
By using these newer technologies carefully, medical practices can improve their work processes, help clinicians work better, and provide better patient care.
Adding AI and health informatics into electronic health records is a step toward solving long-standing challenges with clinical work and patient data. U.S. medical practices that use these tools wisely can improve their operations significantly. This creates a more effective healthcare system that helps doctors, administrators, and patients.
MedKnowts is an AI-enhanced electronic health record (EHR) system designed to streamline the process of accessing and documenting patient information, enabling doctors to spend more time treating patients.
MedKnowts automatically displays patient-specific medical records and employs autocomplete for clinical terms, reducing the time physicians spend searching for information.
Researchers faced challenges such as changing ingrained habits of physicians and limitations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which restricted in-person visits during deployment.
MedKnowts presents relevant historical patient information through interactive cards and uses color-coded chips to categorize clinical terms, making it easier for clinicians to access needed data.
Users, particularly scribes, rated MedKnowts highly for usability, appreciating features like autocomplete and the quick scanning capabilities of color-coded chips.
Future enhancements include refining machine learning algorithms for better relevance in patient records and considering diverse clinician needs for different specialties.
The ultimate goal is to create adaptive EHR systems that allow clinicians to contribute and customize applications to better suit their workflow and preferences.
MedKnowts focuses on displaying relevant patient data based on the clinician’s current documentation needs rather than forcing users to sift through separate, unrelated pages.
By improving EHR usability, MedKnowts aims to facilitate the creation of large-scale health datasets for studying disease progression and treatment effectiveness.
The vision includes enabling clinicians to tailor their systems effectively and ensuring that efficiency gains don’t compromise patient safety and clinical decision-making.
Simbo is using AI agents to automate all phone related workflows. Connect now to know more.
Schedule AI Agents Demo Now© Since 2019, Simbo AI.
