Defining documentation burden (DocBurden) and excess DocBurden for all health professionals: A scoping review.

OBJECTIVE: Efforts to reduce documentation burden (DocBurden) for all health professionals (HP) are aligned with national initiatives to improve clinician wellness and patient safety. Yet DocBurden has not been precisely defined, limiting national conversations and rigorous, reproducible, and meaningful measures. Increasing attention to DocBurden motivated this work to establish a standard definition of DocBurden, with the emergence of excessive DocBurden as a term. METHODS: We conducted a scoping review of DocBurden definitions and descriptions, searching six databases for scholarly, peer-reviewed, and gray literature sources, using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extensions for Scoping Review (PRISMA-ScR) guidance. For the concept clarification phase of work, we used the American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA)'s 6-Domains of Burden Framework. RESULTS: A total of 153 articles were included based on a priori criteria. Most articles described a focus on DocBurden, but only 18% (n=28) provided a definition. We define excessive DocBurden as the stress and unnecessarily heavy work a HP or healthcare team experiences when usability of documentation systems and documentation activities (i.e., generation, review, analysis and synthesis of patient data) are not aligned in support of care delivery. A negative connotation was attached to burden without a neutral state in included sources, which does not align with dictionary definitions of burden. CONCLUSIONS: Existing literature does not distinguish between a baseline or required task load to conduct patient care resulting from usability issues(DocBurden), and the unnecessarily heavy tasks and requirements that contribute to excessive DocBurden. Our definition of excessive DocBurden explicitly acknowledges this distinction, to support development of meaningful measures for understanding and intervening on excessive DocBurden locally, nationally and internationally.

A tribute to Karen Greenwood and her contributions to the American Medical Informatics Association.

After 25 years of service to the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), Ms Karen Greenwood, the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, is leaving the organization. In this perspective, we reflect on her accomplishments and her effect on the organization and the field of informatics nationally and globally. We also express our appreciation and gratitude for Ms Greenwood's role at AMIA.

25 × 5 Symposium to Reduce Documentation Burden: Report-out and Call for Action.

BACKGROUND: The widespread adoption of electronic health records and a simultaneous increase in regulatory demands have led to an acceleration of documentation requirements among clinicians. The corresponding burden from documentation requirements is a central contributor to clinician burnout and can lead to an increased risk of suboptimal patient care. OBJECTIVE: To address the problem of documentation burden, the 25 by 5: Symposium to Reduce Documentation Burden on United States Clinicians by 75% by 2025 (Symposium) was organized to provide a forum for experts to discuss the current state of documentation burden and to identify specific actions aimed at dramatically reducing documentation burden for clinicians. METHODS: The Symposium consisted of six weekly sessions with 33 presentations. The first four sessions included panel presentations discussing the challenges related to documentation burden. The final two sessions consisted of breakout groups aimed at engaging attendees in establishing interventions for reducing clinical documentation burden. Steering Committee members analyzed notes from each breakout group to develop a list of action items. RESULTS: The Steering Committee synthesized and prioritized 82 action items into Calls to Action among three stakeholder groups: Providers and Health Systems, Vendors, and Policy and Advocacy Groups. Action items were then categorized into as short-, medium-, or long-term goals. Themes that emerged from the breakout groups' notes include the following: accountability, evidence is critical, education and training, innovation of technology, and other miscellaneous goals (e.g., vendors will improve shared knowledge databases). CONCLUSION: The Symposium successfully generated a list of interventions for short-, medium-, and long-term timeframes as a launching point to address documentation burden in explicit action-oriented ways. Addressing interventions to reduce undue documentation burden placed on clinicians will necessitate collaboration among all stakeholders.

Informatics-enabled citizen science to advance health equity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has once again highlighted the ubiquity and persistence of health inequities along with our inability to respond to them in a timely and effective manner. There is an opportunity to address the limitations of our current approaches through new models of informatics-enabled research and clinical practice that shift the norm from small- to large-scale patient engagement. We propose augmenting our approach to address health inequities through informatics-enabled citizen science, challenging the types of questions being asked, prioritized, and acted upon. We envision this democratization of informatics that builds upon the inclusive tradition of community-based participatory research (CBPR) as a logical and transformative step toward improving individual, community, and population health in a way that deeply reflects the needs of historically marginalized populations.

A retrospective look at the predictions and recommendations from the 2009 AMIA policy meeting: did we see EHR-related clinician burnout coming?

Clinicians often attribute much of their burnout experience to use of the electronic health record, the adoption of which was greatly accelerated by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009. That same year, AMIA's Policy Meeting focused on possible unintended consequences associated with rapid implementation of electronic health records, generating 17 potential consequences and 15 recommendations to address them. At the 2020 annual meeting of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), ACMI fellows participated in a modified Delphi process to assess the accuracy of the 2009 predictions and the response to the recommendations. Among the findings, the fellows concluded that the degree of clinician burnout and its contributing factors, such as increased documentation requirements, were significantly underestimated. Conversely, problems related to identify theft and fraud were overestimated. Only 3 of the 15 recommendations were adjudged more than half-addressed.

Clinician and Health Care Leaders' Experiences with-and Perceptions of-COVID-19 Documentation Reduction Policies and Practices.

BACKGROUND: Substantial strategies to reduce clinical documentation were implemented by health care systems throughout the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic at national and local levels. This natural experiment provides an opportunity to study the impact of documentation reduction strategies on documentation burden among clinicians and other health professionals in the United States. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to assess clinicians' and other health care leaders' experiences with and perceptions of COVID-19 documentation reduction strategies and identify which implemented strategies should be prioritized and remain permanent post-pandemic. METHODS: We conducted a national survey of clinicians and health care leaders to understand COVID-19 documentation reduction strategies implemented during the pandemic using snowball sampling through professional networks, listservs, and social media. We developed and validated a 19-item survey leveraging existing post-COVID-19 policy and practice recommendations proposed by Sinsky and Linzer. Participants rated reduction strategies for impact on documentation burden on a scale of 0 to 100. Free-text responses were thematically analyzed. RESULTS: Of the 351 surveys initiated, 193 (55%) were complete. Most participants were informaticians and/or clinicians and worked for a health system or in academia. A majority experienced telehealth expansion (81.9%) during the pandemic, which participants also rated as highly impactful (60.1-61.5) and preferred that it remain (90.5%). Implemented at lower proportions, documenting only pertinent positives to reduce note bloat (66.1 ± 28.3), changing compliance rules and performance metrics to eliminate those without evidence of net benefit (65.7 ± 26.3), and electronic health record (EHR) optimization sprints (64.3 ± 26.9) received the highest impact scores compared with other strategies presented; support for these strategies widely ranged (49.7-63.7%). CONCLUSION: The results of this survey suggest there are many perceived sources of and solutions for documentation burden. Within strategies, we found considerable support for telehealth, documenting pertinent positives, and changing compliance rules. We also found substantial variation in the experience of documentation burden among participants.

Engineering information technology for actionable information and better health - balancing social values through desired outcomes, complementary standards and decision-support.

Information technology in health care (HIT) is getting a major boost in the United States through the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The portion of the Act that relates to health information technology (HITECH) seeks to achieve widespread implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) across the land and assure that these EHRs achieve sufficient levels of 'meaningful use' to improve care, reduce costs, and result in better outcomes. This chapter sets the stage for the other chapters that follow in this section. The chapter will review current thinking about how HIT will facilitate collection, dissemination, and evaluation of information throughout the system. Further, it will discuss the role and potential for HIT to support a learning organization [7,8]. Finally, it will outline the current widely identified barriers to progress, e.g., standards development, lack of interoperability and connectivity, and limited decision support that uses evidence-based guidelines created and maintained explicitly to be actionable through computer-based records and systems. Further, with the passage of HITECH, there is a continued attention given to privacy policy at the expense of access to person-specific health information for legitimate social purposes including research and community health. More will be said about this near the end of the chapter. Finally, the chapter will end with a discussion of the difference between information and communication and it will advocate for greater attention to the use of technology as a tool for improve communications and not simply storage and transmission of information.

Language matters: precision health as a cross-cutting care, research and policy agenda.

The biomedical research and healthcare delivery communities have increasingly come to focus their attention on the role of data and computation in order to improve the quality, safety, costs, and outcomes of both wellness promotion and care delivery. Depending on the scale of such efforts, and the environments in which they are situated, they are referred to variably as personalized or precision medicine, population health, clinical transformation, value-driven care, or value-based transformation. Despite the original intent of many efforts and publications that have sought to define personalized, precision, or data-driven approaches to improving health and wellness, the use of such terminology in current practice often treats said activities as discrete areas of endeavor within minimal cross-linkage across or between scales of inquiry. We believe that this current state creates numerous barriers that are preventing the advancement of relevant science, practice, and policy. As such, we believe that it is necessary to amplify and reaffirm our collective understanding that these fields share common means of inquiry, differentiated only by the units of measure being utilized, their sources of data, and the manner in which they are executed. Therefore, in this perspective, we explore and focus attention on such commonalities and then present a conceptual framework that links constituent activities into an integrated model that we refer to as a precision healthcare system. The presentation of this framework is intended to provide the basis for the types of shared, broad-based, and descriptive language needed to reference and realize such a framework.

Defining the medical subspecialty of clinical informatics.

As the professional home for biomedical and health informaticians, AMIA is actively working to support high quality relevant professional education and research opportunities. This issue of JAMIA presents two key documents that provide tangible evidence of progress on this front. In this editorial, we describe the context and specific purpose of the two documents, how they were developed, and AMIA's plans to build upon the documents.

Program requirements for fellowship education in the subspecialty of clinical informatics.

The Program Requirements for Fellowship Education identify the knowledge and skills that physicians must master through the course of a training program to be certified in the subspecialty of clinical informatics. They also specify accreditation requirements for clinical informatics training programs. The AMIA Board of Directors approved this document in November 2008.

Core content for the subspecialty of clinical informatics.

The Core Content for Clinical Informatics defines the boundaries of the discipline and informs the Program Requirements for Fellowship Education in Clinical Informatics. The Core Content includes four major categories: fundamentals, clinical decision making and care process improvement, health information systems, and leadership and management of change. The AMIA Board of Directors approved the Core Content for Clinical Informatics in November 2008.

How to successfully select and implement electronic health records (EHR) in small ambulatory practice settings.

BACKGROUND: Adoption of EHRs by U.S. ambulatory practices has been slow despite the perceived benefits of their use. Most evaluations of EHR implementations in the literature apply to large practice settings. While there are similarities relating to EHR implementation in large and small practice settings, the authors argue that scale is an important differentiator. Focusing on small ambulatory practices, this paper outlines the benefits and barriers to EHR use in this setting, and provides a "field guide" for these practices to facilitate successful EHR implementation. DISCUSSION: The benefits of EHRs in ambulatory practices include improved patient care and office efficiency, and potential financial benefits. Barriers to EHRs include costs; lack of standardization of EHR products and the design of vendor systems for large practice environments; resistance to change; initial difficulty of system use leading to productivity reduction; and perceived accrual of benefits to society and payers rather than providers. The authors stress the need for developing a flexible change management strategy when introducing EHRs that is relevant to the small practice environment; the strategy should acknowledge the importance of relationship management and the role of individual staff members in helping the entire staff to manage change. Practice staff must create an actionable vision outlining realistic goals for the implementation, and all staff must buy into the project. The authors detail the process of implementing EHRs through several stages: decision, selection, pre-implementation, implementation, and post-implementation. They stress the importance of identifying a champion to serve as an advocate of the value of EHRs and provide direction and encouragement for the project. Other key activities include assessing and redesigning workflow; understanding financial issues; conducting training that is well-timed and meets the needs of practice staff; and evaluating the implementation process. SUMMARY: The EHR implementation experience depends on a variety of factors including the technology, training, leadership, the change management process, and the individual character of each ambulatory practice environment. Sound processes must support both technical and personnel-related organizational components. Additional research is needed to further refine recommendations for the small physician practice and the nuances of specific medical specialties.

Sharing innovation: the case for technology standards in health professions education.

Information technologies have provided fertile ground for innovation in healthcare education, but too often these innovations have been limited in scope and impact. One way of addressing these limitations is the development of common and open technology standards to scale innovation across organizational boundaries. Research on the diffusion of standards indicates that environmental forces, such as regulatory changes, top-down management support, and feasibility are key determinants of standards adoption. This paper describes the perspective and work of MedBiquitous, the only internationally recognized standards body in healthcare education. Many innovators are implementing MedBiquitous healthcare education standards to effect change within and across organizations. In a resource-constrained and knowledge intensive domain such as healthcare education, collaboration is an imperative. Technology standards are essential to raise the quality of healthcare education and assessment in a cost-effective manner.

A roadmap for national action on clinical decision support.

This document comprises an AMIA Board of Directors approved White Paper that presents a roadmap for national action on clinical decision support. It is published in JAMIA for archival and dissemination purposes. The full text of this material has been previously published on the AMIA Web site (www.amia.org/inside/initiatives/cds). AMIA is the copyright holder.

Toward a national framework for the secondary use of health data: an American Medical Informatics Association White Paper.

Secondary use of health data applies personal health information (PHI) for uses outside of direct health care delivery. It includes such activities as analysis, research, quality and safety measurement, public health, payment, provider certification or accreditation, marketing, and other business applications, including strictly commercial activities. Secondary use of health data can enhance health care experiences for individuals, expand knowledge about disease and appropriate treatments, strengthen understanding about effectiveness and efficiency of health care systems, support public health and security goals, and aid businesses in meeting customers' needs. Yet, complex ethical, political, technical, and social issues surround the secondary use of health data. While not new, these issues play increasingly critical and complex roles given current public and private sector activities not only expanding health data volume, but also improving access to data. Lack of coherent policies and standard "good practices" for secondary use of health data impedes efforts to strengthen the U.S. health care system. The nation requires a framework for the secondary use of health data with a robust infrastructure of policies, standards, and best practices. Such a framework can guide and facilitate widespread collection, storage, aggregation, linkage, and transmission of health data. The framework will provide appropriate protections for legitimate secondary use.

Research challenges for electronic health records.

The availability and use of electronic health records (EHRs) are likely to increase markedly over the next 10 years. This promulgation of EHRs will change dramatically the delivery of healthcare in the United States. Researchers seeking to maximize the impact of EHRs face at least two major and quite different challenges. First, rigorous evaluations of EHR systems are vital but not easily achieved. Second, researchers must determine how to take full advantage of the potential to create and disseminate new knowledge that is possible as a result of the data that are captured by EHRs. This paper reviews critical methodologic issues that need to be considered in the evaluation of EHRs, identifies pivotal policy issues that impact the ability of researchers (and public health professionals) to use the data that will accumulate as a result of EHR diffusion, and recommends actions for those who are interested in changing the landscape of EHR development, research, and implementation.

Will the wave finally break? A brief view of the adoption of electronic medical records in the United States.

For over thirty years, there have been predictions that the widespread clinical use of computers was imminent. Yet the "wave" has never broken. In this article, two broad time periods are examined: the 1960's to the 1980's and the 1980's to the present. Technology immaturity, health administrator focus on financial systems, application "unfriendliness," and physician resistance were all barriers to acceptance during the early time period. Although these factors persist, changes in clinicians' economics, more computer literacy in the general population, and, most importantly, changes in government policies and increased support for clinical computing suggest that the wave may break in the next decade.

A consensus action agenda for achieving the national health information infrastructure.

BACKGROUND: Improving the safety, quality, and efficiency of health care will require immediate and ubiquitous access to complete patient information and decision support provided through a National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII). METHODS: To help define the action steps needed to achieve an NHII, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sponsored a national consensus conference in July 2003. RESULTS: Attendees favored a public-private coordination group to guide NHII activities, provide education, share resources, and monitor relevant metrics to mark progress. They identified financial incentives, health information standards, and overcoming a few important legal obstacles as key NHII enablers. Community and regional implementation projects, including consumer access to a personal health record, were seen as necessary to demonstrate comprehensive functional systems that can serve as models for the entire nation. Finally, the participants identified the need for increased funding for research on the impact of health information technology on patient safety and quality of care. Individuals, organizations, and federal agencies are using these consensus recommendations to guide NHII efforts.

Building the national health information infrastructure for personal health, health care services, public health, and research.

BACKGROUND: Improving health in our nation requires strengthening four major domains of the health care system: personal health management, health care delivery, public health, and health-related research. Many avoidable shortcomings in the health sector that result in poor quality are due to inaccessible data, information, and knowledge. A national health information infrastructure (NHII) offers the connectivity and knowledge management essential to correct these shortcomings. Better health and a better health system are within our reach. DISCUSSION: A national health information infrastructure for the United States should address the needs of personal health management, health care delivery, public health, and research. It should also address relevant global dimensions (e.g., standards for sharing data and knowledge across national boundaries). The public and private sectors will need to collaborate to build a robust national health information infrastructure, essentially a 'paperless' health care system, for the United States. The federal government should assume leadership for assuring a national health information infrastructure as recommended by the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. Progress is needed in the areas of funding, incentives, standards, and continued refinement of a privacy (i.e., confidentiality and security) framework to facilitate personal identification for health purposes. Particular attention should be paid to NHII leadership and change management challenges. SUMMARY: A national health information infrastructure is a necessary step for improved health in the U.S. It will require a concerted, collaborative effort by both public and private sectors.