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This article is sponsored by the Nuance® Dragon® Ambient eXperience, an AI-powered, voice-enabled ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) solution that automatically documents patient encounters at the point of care.
Nuance Communications, Inc., now part of Microsoft, is a technology pioneer with market leadership in conversational AI and ambient clinical intelligence solutions such as Dragon Medical One and Dragon Ambient eXperience that amplify people’s ability to help others.
Burnout has long been an issue that has plagued frontline health care workers. The COVID pandemic has increased burnout both in its intensity and scale, with more physicians reporting feelings of burnout. Pre-pandemic, 42 percent of physicians said they were burned out, and 64 percent said it has intensified due to the pandemic. Unfortunately, with a growing physician shortage (90K predicted by 2025) and an aging population (83.7M people 65 years or older by 2050), the problem is expected to persist. Burnout has had a negative impact on clinician well-being and satisfaction. But there’s much that can be done to offset the problem. AI-driven technologies, such as ambient clinical intelligence, can dramatically decrease administrative burdens to restore quality of life and the joy of practicing medicine while improving care delivery.
What is ambient clinical intelligence?
Ambient intelligence (AmI) augments human capabilities to make our lives easier, and it is becoming more pervasive in our homes and workplaces. The applications are many, especially in health care. In health care, a type of AmI, ambient clinical intelligence (ACI), is used to efficiently diagnose and monitor patients, detect and predict illness, accelerate drug development, improve the patient experience, and expand access to care. The technology is providing time savings, and that time savings is having a significant impact on operational efficiencies and improved experiences for all.
How ACI for documentation helps
It is no surprise that Medscape’s burnout and depression report cited “too many bureaucratic tasks” as the leading cause of clinician burnout. Especially when you consider that for every hour of patient care, two hours are spent documenting it. The administrative burdens of managing patient care and meeting increasing compliance and documentation requirements frustrate clinicians and interfere with their ability to practice medicine.
The Nuance® Dragon® Ambient eXperience™, or DAX™ for short, is an AI-powered, voice-enabled ACI solution that automatically documents patient encounters accurately and efficiently at the point of care. For use in office and telehealth settings, in all ambulatory specialties, including primary and urgent care, DAX enhances the quality of care and the patient experience while increasing clinician efficiency and satisfaction. DAX captures the patient-clinician conversation, and deep-learning-based AI automatically converts encounter conversations into medical documentation tailored to each specialty. Simply said, DAX is clinical documentation that writes itself™ – and delivers significant outcomes.
In a Nuance survey, DAX clinicians reported time savings of 7 minutes per encounter, reducing documentation time by 50 percent, which many organizations are using to see 3 to 5 more patients on average per day. Clinicians also reported a 70 percent reduction in feelings of burnout and fatigue. Patients are benefiting too. In fact, 83 percent say their physician is more personable and conversational, and 81 percent say their physician is more focused since using DAX.
Reducing burnout and improving patient care
Dr. Alfred Atanda, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Delaware, has firsthand experience with burnout: “So many of us physicians spend so much of our time doing other things [beyond patient care] that are not of true value to us, and over time, it erodes you, little by little.” His number one concern outside patient care is documentation: “Notes take time, and they are tedious – it’s a direct correlate to burnout in large health care settings.”
Since using Nuance DAX in his practice, Dr. Atanda and his care team have felt relief from some of those administrative burdens – allowing them to be a more efficient team while connecting and bonding more deeply with their patients.
DAX ensures the primary focus of each visit is the patient and their story, not notetaking or documentation. That strengthens the patient-physician relationship and increases patient satisfaction, engagement, and retention. It brings providers back to what attracted them to medicine in the first place. And it removes the heart-sinking feeling of getting to the end of clinic time and seeing hours of documentation tasks ahead.
A glimpse into the not-too-distant future
This is just the beginning of the benefits DAX can bring. Over time, DAX will open an entire clinical intelligence ecosystem fueled by different AI algorithms that can spot indicators of depression, anxiety, and social determinants of health, which can be selected and seamlessly deployed to clinical teams at the point of care to solve complex operational and clinical challenges. The potential applications are almost limitless, but one thing is certain: this technology will change the experience of care for physicians and patients and help both groups lead happier, healthier lives.
Discover how Nuance DAX can help you reduce burnout and improve patient experiences in your practice.
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Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today we have a special sponsored episode about how ambient clinical intelligence can improve patient care and reduce clinician burnout. It’s brought to you by the Dragon Ambient Experience, or DAX for short, an innovative ambient clinical intelligence solution from Nuance Communications and Microsoft. Find out more at nuance.com/exploreDAX. That’s nuance.com/E-X-P-L-O-R-E-D-A-X.
Today I’m joined by Alfred Atanda Jr. He’s a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Nemours Children’s Health in Delaware, where he serves as the chief of the Center for Sports Medicine and the chief of clinician experience, and is also an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University. Alfred, welcome to the show.
Alfred Atanda: Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for having me. Much appreciated.
Kevin Pho: So let’s start by telling our viewers a little bit about you. Please share your story and journey to where you are today.
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, so actually, my family is originally from Ghana, but I was born and raised in South Jersey. I was educated on the East Coast and eventually became an orthopedic surgeon at Nemours, where it’s my only job. I was a sports medicine surgeon doing the regular stuff that we do, but I kind of fell into this new administrative, part-time role with physician and clinician well-being, and that’s really taken over a lot of my time, my non-clinical time anyway. So it has been a long path. I was on the regular, straight-and-narrow path like every other doc, but I kind of pivoted and changed gears a little bit into what I’m doing now with physician well-being.
Kevin Pho: All right. So many hospitals, as you know, are focusing more on physician well-being. From your perspective as a physician, what are some of the causes of declining physician well-being?
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, I mean, it’s multifactorial, but I think the underlying problem is that a lot of us physicians have, in our hearts and our bellies, what really drives us into health care. I always give this example: When I was a kid, I really liked Starbursts. I always loved the purple, pink, and red Starbursts, but I always hated the orange and yellow ones. So over time, the orange and yellow ones would build up, and nobody wants them.
It’s kind of like that. For me, I like bonding and connecting with patients. I like providing care. I like interfacing with cutting-edge technology as a surgeon. But there’s a whole host of other things that I wasn’t quite aware of when I was training, and they really kind of take over your life in terms of compliance and legal and privacy and HIPAA. I think, just at a high level, so many of us physicians spend so much of our time doing other things that are not of true value to us. And you have to make money and you have to have a family and live your life and stay healthy and do all the things, and over time it erodes you, little by little. I think that’s kind of the core essence of what we’re dealing with. Obviously, it’s not a simple problem, but I think that’s just kind of the main issue that most physicians are dealing with these days as it relates to burnout and well-being.
Kevin Pho: Now, you mentioned as part of your story that you spend a lot of your administrative time trying to improve clinician well-being. What challenges do you plan to address, and how do you hope to improve physician well-being within your community?
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, so the biggest barrier I would say that we face is culture. As you know, the culture of health care, specifically academic medicine, has been one where we provide for patients and we make money, and that’s what the system is designed to do. It’s not necessarily designed to take care of us. So changing the model and the paradigm of how we look at how hospitals function, to integrate and incorporate taking care of the people who are the frontline providers doing the work, is going to be a challenge, because that’s been ingrained in all of our DNA for decades, basically. I think chipping away at that culture is going to be first and foremost the biggest issue.
Secondly, how do we show that taking care of the people that are doing the work is of value financially? Showing that kind of return on investment and return on value is going to be key, because it’s very easy to say, “OK, well, if I feel good, I’m going to be a better doctor,” quote unquote, but the proof is always in the pudding. So with a lot of our projects and our endeavors, we’re always looking at metrics. Are we saving time? Are we allowing physicians to see more patients with some of these projects? Are we allowing physicians to take better care of these patients? And we want to have objective data to show that. So basically, cultural change and showing how this can be of financial value to larger health care ecosystems is going to be a huge challenge, but it’s an exciting challenge nonetheless.
Kevin Pho: Can you tell us a story or a case study where you’ve moved the needle, or you’ve had a success or a win when it comes to changing that culture or having the systems recognize the value of tackling clinician burnout?
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, for sure. At our hospital, as with many hospitals, we have an on-call service where, as a specialist, community physicians and PCPs and urgent cares can get a hold of a specialist who’s on call. For us, it’s called the Physician Priority Line. Outside physicians can call in. When it was devised, probably 10 years ago, by somebody who doesn’t even work at our institution anymore, the goal was just to provide access to the folks in the community and to help generate revenue. And as a specialist on call, I’m operating, I’m seeing my own patients, and I’m getting all these phone calls and all these other things.
So we started to take a deep dive into, “OK, what actually happens with this PPL line,” as we call it. What we found as we started investigating and peeling away the onion is that, in actuality, a lot of the calls we were receiving weren’t from other physicians. They weren’t physician-related problems. They took up an exorbitant amount of time just to gather the information and connect with them and call them back. But most importantly, around 5 percent of the time, it was actually resulting in a new appointment to our system.
I think this was really eye-opening, because in large academic health care systems, and even private ones, there are so many initiatives that somebody thinks are a good idea, and we do them. They just thrust them upon the physicians, and everybody just falls in line and does it. And then eight years later, you look back and you don’t even know why you’re doing it. You don’t know if it’s beneficial. So I think these kinds of early wins, being able to say, “Listen, we’ve been doing this, but let’s revisit it once a quarter or once a year to ensure that it’s still providing value and to ensure it’s not too burdensome,” that was a very big early win for us. And as you can imagine, there are hundreds of those sorts of examples that are very rampant in health care today.
Kevin Pho: Well, as you know, with so many demands on their time, physicians today report record levels of burnout, and that jeopardizes their well-being. Burnout is caused by many factors, one of which, of course, we’re going to talk about today: clinical documentation. Studies indicate physicians spend two hours documenting care for every hour spent with patients. Alfred, have you and your colleagues experienced burnout because of administrative burdens like clinical documentation? And if yes, tell us about that experience.
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, I mean, you kind of hit the nail on the head. It’s kind of a direct correlate. As I was talking about, of a lot of those extraneous, external things outside of providing clinical care that we have to deal with, I would say number one is documentation. It’s interesting, because in most facets of our life, when you give money to get some product or some service, you usually get the product right then and there. For us in health care, you see a patient, they go through the treatment algorithm, they leave your office, and you don’t get paid until however many weeks later, until you document, right? So documentation, as you know, is of no value to your average physician. It’s just that they have to do it in order to get paid.
So we want to find a way to blend and meld what you’re actually doing that provides value and joy to you with what you’re getting compensated for. Right now, to see a patient in the office in a pediatric setting, and really connect with a youth athlete and help them through the injury that they’re dealing with and get them on the path to recovery, I don’t get paid for that. I get paid to do the note. And as you know, that note takes time. Sure, it’s tedious. So yeah, that’s what we’ve kind of unpeeled, to really learn how documentation is directly correlated to burnout in large health care settings.
Kevin Pho: Now let’s talk about the impact of documentation on patients. Do documentation requirements negatively impact patients? And can you share a story or a case study that would illustrate that impact?
Alfred Atanda: Yeah. I don’t know exactly where this picture is from, but it’s definitely something I’ve seen at well-being conferences. A little girl, she’s like six or seven years old, was asked to draw a picture of her doctor. What she drew was her and her mom in the doctor’s office, and the doctor had their back to them and was typing. That’s really eye-opening, because that’s what it turns into for a lot of folks, specifically in the primary care, family practice realm, where some of these notes are really long. In order to save time, you see the patient and evaluate them while you’re documenting. And as you know, not all of us can look at a patient and type in an EMR without looking at the screen. So what invariably happens is you’re going “uh-huh,” nodding, and you’re typing away, and the patient and that interaction and that bond suffer.
Again, it’s hard to quantify what that actually translates into, but I really do think that, for a lot of specialties and a lot of different types of doctors, they’re so overwhelmed and so burdened that the majority of their face-to-face interactions with patients are, unfortunately, spent looking at a screen. If you’ve been to the doctor recently, you know. We’re human beings. We thrive on connection and bonding with other human beings, and the ties that bind us together are so strong. Unfortunately, a lot of times our attention is diverted away to other things that are of no value to the patients. So that’s definitely something that has come up in the past few years in my role here.
Kevin Pho: So talk about your personal journey with the various clinical documentation tools that are out there. What have you used in the past, and what are you using today?
Alfred Atanda: So when I first started my practice 12 years ago, documentation was either just typing into Epic, or you would dictate into a phone and somebody would listen to that dictation and type it. Then it graduated to an app, where you would have an app on your phone and you would talk into it, and then, same thing, a human being would listen and type it, but they would type exactly what they thought you were saying. And then along came Dragon, also from Nuance, where you talk into your phone in real time and it shows up on the screen. But again, that’s just exactly what you’re saying, word for word. Obviously, some people use scribes and different things, which we’ve tried at our institution.
And kind of the most recent stop on our journey, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later in the episode, is DAX, or Dragon Ambient Experience software, where it really kind of allows me to talk to a patient in real time in a normal setting, bond with them, connect with them, get whatever information I need from them, and convey whatever information I need to them, all the while the note is being generated simultaneously in the background. I think it’s really come a long way in terms of this journey and timeline of documentation in recent years.
Kevin Pho: So we are going to talk about the DAX system. This episode is brought to you by the Dragon Ambient Experience, or DAX for short. It’s an innovative ambient clinical intelligence solution from Nuance and Microsoft. Find out more at nuance.com/exploreDAX. That’s nuance.com/E-X-P-L-O-R-E-D-A-X.
So, Alfred, before DAX, what other challenges was your organization experiencing that made you consider ambient clinical intelligence?
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, I think one of the main problems before DAX is that you couldn’t always document in real time as you were doing work with the patient, unless you wanted the patient visit to suffer. So what a lot of us do is we see our patient and give them our undivided attention, but then you have to get up and leave and go document. That’s kind of what I was alluding to before. The patient has now left, the value has now been bestowed upon them, and they feel better about their issue. But in order to be reimbursed, now you have to sit down and document and sift through the EHR and all that other stuff. That kind of sequential way of documentation is very inefficient, right? Because why isn’t there a way that I can provide value and document in real time? I think that’s kind of the problem that the DAX solution was brought in for. For years we were seeing patients and then documenting, so we were just very inefficient, kind of muddling through the clinical workflow.
Kevin Pho: Now, for those who may not be familiar with ambient clinical intelligence, can you explain what DAX does and how you use DAX in your clinical workflow? Again, can you share maybe a story or a case study that would really illustrate that workflow?
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, it’s very interesting. I’m not a chief technology officer or anything, but my basic understanding of it is that it uses AI-driven software, in conjunction with a real person, to learn and get smarter over time about how you practice, how you talk, and what your workflows are. You embed a little bit of your own templates into it, and they serve as a structure. And then basically, it’s an ambient experience, so it’s able to capture the voices of the people in the room. It’s basically able to filter out babies crying and sirens going off. If you talk about extraneous stuff like sports and politics, it doesn’t include that in the note. It’s really able to extract the key, clinically valuable information from that ambient experience and put it into a note in the template and form that you prefer. So it’s not going to just make a note for you. You kind of have to guide it a little bit. Up front, you do a little bit of work embedding some of those templates into the software, and the DAX people help you do all that, and then it comes out the way that you like.
One of the things that I’ve really liked about DAX, and I don’t have a specific case, but in general, it’s actually helped me with education of trainees a little bit more. That’s a very unexpected benefit. Most of the time, when a trainee goes in, they go into the room, they talk to the patient, they come out, they present to me, I talk it over with them, and I go back in the room. So now what we do is, when they come out and present to me, I hit record on DAX. You don’t actually have to be in the patient’s room. It just records whatever discussion is occurring. So now the trainee comes out and tells me the story, and I interpret images or X-rays with them and teach them, all the while DAX is capturing that. Then we go back into the room and finish up with the family, and when we’re done, the documentation’s over.
Normally the trainee would then have to go sit at the computer and type really quickly, and I’d be annoyed because I have to wait for them before I can go see the next patient. Or they would just save all their notes for the end of clinic, and they’d stay there an extra hour doing them. So now all of that is mitigated and reduced, which I actually wasn’t expecting, but that’s a really key benefit for those of us that work in academic settings: You can incorporate trainees and scribes and MAs right into that very seamlessly.
Kevin Pho: And is that note created pretty much instantaneously?
Alfred Atanda: So at first it takes a bit of time as it gets to learn your system and your style. It takes about two to three hours as you set off on your initial journey working with DAX. But now sometimes it’s up to 30 minutes, where I’ll just keep seeing patients and then the note will pop in, just like if I had documented it. Then you can go in and edit it and do whatever you need to do. So it gets quicker and faster and learns, just like any other AI-enabled software technology.
Kevin Pho: So what about that editing process? Because sometimes with other transcription services, you have to go over the note and edit it. What’s it like with DAX?
Alfred Atanda: Like I said, initially there are some hiccups as the AI learns your techniques. I’ve been doing it since April of 2022, so it’s been a while, and the editing is very minimal. If for whatever reason something was muffled, or the phone was far away from whoever was talking, you may have to add a couple of things. But I would say, in general, for a note generated by DAX, I would spend less than a minute just glancing over it and adding things. If they don’t get something, they put in an asterisk for you to fill it in. But yeah, it’s very minimal editing, to be honest with you.
Kevin Pho: So you mentioned the effects of DAX on your trainees, or people who are moving through your program, and how it helps them from an educational standpoint. How about other members of your care team? How has DAX affected the other members of your care team?
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, so as a sports medicine surgeon, I work with athletic trainers, and these are master’s-level individuals who are really my eyes and ears throughout the clinic and serve as the quarterback of really running clinic. But a lot of their time and their burden is also documentation, right? They kind of serve as scribes. They follow me around typing notes and such, but that’s not of any value to them, and they’re not valuable to me if they’re spending their time and their energy just typing what I’m saying.
So when I go into a room now, I can take DAX with me, and then my athletic trainer can go see another patient, or she can call a mom back with MRI results, or she can look at a patient in tomorrow’s clinic and make sure they have the appropriate scripts before they come in. Those are things that are of true value to me as an orthopedic surgeon. So DAX allows all members of my team to now do things that I find valuable, as opposed to spending an inordinate amount of time following me around writing the words that I say. And that helps them, because that’s very tedious and burdensome to them as well, and it gives them a little bit more entitlement and empowerment to do things that they find more relevant and clinically valuable.
Kevin Pho: How about the impact of DAX on patients? How has it positively impacted patients and their experiences at your facility?
Alfred Atanda: As we alluded to earlier in the episode, first of all, I’m in a pediatric place, so all the kids think it’s cool. I tell them I have this app, and I’m like, “Hey, don’t mind me, it’s just going to eavesdrop and type our note.” But in all seriousness, I think they enjoy it because they have my undivided attention. I don’t have to be looking in Epic or the EHR, or scribbling notes and writing things down, like I used to, so I can go out and then dictate. I literally sit there and look at them and talk to them and ask them how their soccer game went, or how the homecoming dance was, or how the weather is for them, anything where I can just be relaxed and not have in the back of my mind, “OK, hurry up. I’ve got to go dictate. I’ve got to go do this.”
It just changes the overall vibe of the clinic visit, and I feel a lot less stressed. So I’m assuming that kind of transfers to them and allows them to be a bit more relaxed too, because they’re at the doctor, and they have some anxiety-inducing problem with their knee or their ankle or whatever. The last thing they need is to have me on edge, or have me trying to rush out of the room because I have my own responsibilities to do.
Kevin Pho: Now, some physicians might be hesitant to adopt new technologies. In your opinion, what causes some of this hesitation?
Alfred Atanda: I mean, physicians are creatures of habit. We have our workflow, especially older ones. We’ve been doing the same things for many years, and it gets us from point A to point B. It allows us to do our job and go home and live our lives, and at the end of the day, that’s what we all want to do. And I think, specifically in some larger health care ecosystems, whenever something new is introduced, it’s invariably something that, A, we don’t care too much about; B, it’s for some reason or some external regulatory endeavor that we don’t even understand; but most importantly, the third thing is that it invariably just makes our jobs harder. When you get an email blast from the CMO or the physician-in-chief about some new endeavor, you’re like, “Oh my God. All right, fine.” But us, we’re resilient. We’re gritty. We’ve been in the trenches since day one. There’s nothing you can throw at us that we can’t handle. We roll up our sleeves, we get to work, and we get it done. But that’s a very adversarial relationship with administration, which is another huge part of burnout and lack of well-being.
So I think, for something like this, if you don’t do it appropriately, it’s going to fail before it even begins. What Nemours has done, which is great, is they’ve really worked with about 20 to 25 go-getter, innovator, early-adopter-type docs, younger docs, people like myself who are willing to just try things out and see what’s going on. I did it for about seven months. Some people did it for about a year. Then we compiled all our data. We looked at the patient satisfaction scores, we looked at timing in the EHR and documentation, and we were able to present this to the physicians in a very collegial way: “This isn’t coming from administration. This is being supported by administration, but it’s coming from us, your fellow doctors. This was my experience. This is how I did it. This is what I troubleshot. This is how I got better doing it.”
That inspires buy-in, and people are like, “Huh, well, he was able to do it. Maybe I should try that.” But I think a lot of organizations mean well with things like DAX, and you have to be very careful about how you roll it out. Because if you don’t sell it appropriately to the physicians, so that they think and realize it’ll be something that is to benefit them and how they provide care, everybody just shuts down and nobody wants to do it.
Kevin Pho: Now, the introduction of DAX, was that administratively driven, or was that driven by clinicians?
Alfred Atanda: It was a little bit of both, actually. Obviously, our CMIO, who’s an administrator, was interfacing at a high level with Nuance on how to bring that to our system. But one of the beauties of what we’ve been trying to do in physician well-being in our hospital is to bring physicians and the appropriate stakeholders into those decisions early and often, right? You don’t bring some vendor or some company in, and then a year and a half later, when you’ve spent $600,000 and all of these hours implementing it and getting it to a perfect point, then you bring in doctors. Because what if they don’t like it? Or what if it doesn’t work, or what if it doesn’t do what you need it to do?
The smart thing that Nemours did was to bring our chief wellness officer, who’s a physician, and myself and other appropriate stakeholders in right up front: “OK, this is how we’re going to roll it out, stepwise. These are the early adopters we’re going to reach out to.” We were always ingraining the message that this is for the physicians, to benefit them and to benefit their patients. It does happen to be a new initiative. It does happen to be provided by a vendor. It does cost money. But you have those conversations. It’s like you have this bad pill that you have to swallow, but you put it in ice cream or yogurt or something that tastes good. If you mesh it all together, it’s palatable and people embrace it, but you’re still getting the appropriate message to wherever it needs to go. And I think that’s really the underpinning of physician well-being these days.
Kevin Pho: So obviously you’ve had a positive experience when it comes to implementing DAX. Now, what about the other clinicians in your system? What were those first few months like as they ramped up to the AI and got DAX to learn their practice styles? What was it like for them?
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, I mean, it definitely has its hiccups. It’s definitely not perfect. You do have to put in a little bit of work up front to ensure that you get a good product. And I think we set ourselves up for success in the sense that we picked physicians who were willing to do that, and we picked physicians who knew that’s what they were going to have to do. If you just sell it to somebody, “Hey, try this new ambient experience thing, it’ll be great,” then the second they have one or two hiccups, that’s it. They’re not doing it anymore.
So yeah, there were issues, but we were well aware of that. The DAX people were very transparent that at first the notes are going to take several hours, and at first the notes are going to need you to put in a lot of editing time and input information so it can learn from you. That transparency and that collegiality made some of those hiccups and those technological shortcomings not so unpalatable, to be honest with you. But yeah, I always sell that to people and help them understand that it is going to be a little bit of a work in progress.
Kevin Pho: And is DAX implemented system-wide?
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, we just started in January. The CMIO is working out all the details, but that’s the goal for 2023: that any physician who would like to try it will have the opportunity to do so.
Kevin Pho: And it’s probably too early for data when it comes to well-being, but just anecdotally, what have you heard from your colleagues who’ve been using DAX in terms of how it affects their well-being?
Alfred Atanda: Yeah, I mean, I would say this: I wouldn’t say DAX in and of itself improves your well-being. What I would say is that having an armamentarium of clinical documentation tools at your disposal, to use in an autonomous way when you need it, for whichever particular clinical scenario, is what’s most beneficial for physicians. You don’t have one screwdriver to build a house. You have all kinds of tools, and DAX is just one of them. I do think DAX is a little bit of a game changer, and it’s a lot further along than some of the other documentation tools we have, also looking at scribes and other things. But I think just knowing that the organization is committed to helping us relieve this necessary burden, and is giving us tools that we can use to get through it, I think that’s the true essence of the improvement of well-being. Obviously, DAX is great, and I personally like it, and I do like having it in my toolbox, but I think what it signifies is even bigger than just an app that helps you do your notes.
Kevin Pho: And my final question, Alfred: What are some of your take-home messages that you’d like to share with the KevinMD audience?
Alfred Atanda: I mean, I think, as an innovator and a pioneer myself, you have to be able to embrace new technology and new tools and new solutions. I think we do get very entrenched and ingrained in our ways, but in order to really grow personally and professionally as physicians, you do have to be able to embrace new things that make you a little bit uncomfortable, and that’s the only way that you can progress.
And secondly, in the vein of physician well-being and burnout, obviously documentation is just one part of it. This is mostly for any administrators that may be listening: The true benefit that you’re going to get from any endeavor or any project that you want to bring to light is that it has to be a systems-level approach to well-being. The old adage of, “Oh, you have to be stronger. You have to be more resilient. You need to go see a therapist or do yoga or take care of yourself so you can work in this chaotic, fragmented, not-so-efficient environment,” that’s not going to work. The idea has to be a systems-level, organization-wide approach to improve the environment, such that these great physicians, who are doing the work that brings them value and joy, can thrive and grow and do what they need to do. That’s something, again, that I’ve learned in the past three years in my role. There are a lot of challenges ahead, as we discussed earlier, but I think we’re moving the needle in the right direction, and I think it’s providing a lot of hope for a lot of physicians out there.
Kevin Pho: Well, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, Alfred. You’ve been listening to today’s special sponsored episode about how ambient clinical intelligence can improve patient care and reduce clinician burnout, brought to you by the Dragon Ambient Experience, or DAX for short, an innovative ambient clinical intelligence solution from Nuance Communications and Microsoft. Find out more at nuance.com/exploreDAX. That’s nuance.com/E-X-P-L-O-R-E-D-A-X. Thank you so much for listening.
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