KLAS Looks at Vendors Aiming to Help Clinicians Get the Most of of their EHRs

There’s a ton of information in the EHR, but if clinicians have to spend their precious time digging around for it, the benefits can be lost. KLAS recently decided to take a look at a set of vendors focused on making it easier to surface such data. In this interview with healthsystemsCIO, Jackson Tate, Research Director at KLAS, discusses the organization’s new report: “Clinical Digital Workflow 2024: Streamlining EHR Workflows with AI & Other Advanced Technologies.”

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Bold Statements

If you look back at the Meaningful Use journey of how these EHRs were developed, a lot of hard work was put into making these systems compliant, making sure that these systems supported IT infrastructures, that they worked within a growing and evolving IDN system of hospitals and clinics all trying to connect one to another. But ultimately, the requirements for billing, the requirements for coding, the requirements for that IT infrastructure did have an impact on the clinicians. It impacted the frontline folks who are taking care of us and our family members.

… all of these vendors are scoring incredibly well which means their customers are happy, they’re saying it’s worth the investment, it’s worth the time that they’re spending to get it set up and the resources they’re spending there. The implications there is it’s driving outcomes.

This should be considered. There’s tons of options for improving clinician efficiency, that’s kind of like the macro for all of this.  This should be a weapon in the arsenal.

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemsCIO’s Interview with Jackson Tate, Research Director at KLAS. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Jackson thanks for joining me.

Jackson: Absolutely, Anthony. Thanks for having me, excited to connect with you.

Anthony: Your new Clinical Digital Workflow 2024, Streamlining EHR Workflows with AI and Other Advance Technologies is an interesting report.  I am looking forward to chatting with you about it. Lets start out with you telling me about your organization and your role at KLAS.

Jackson: KLAS is like the Consumer Reports of the healthcare IT world. Essentially we work to improve the delivery of healthcare by providing transparency on vendor performance. We interview customers about their experience working with different technologies across many different vectors, many different segments, all within healthcare.

We anonymized the feedback and publish it so we can be a resource for others who are looking at similar technologies. Our readers can see what the experience might be like if they partner with one of the vendors that are in space.

Anthony: You guys have a million things you could be looking at. Give us a little info on how you decide what you are going to focus on.

Jackson: It’s a great question. The way that we decide our report focus is largely determined by customer needs, customer inquiry. A customer is anyone purchasing an HIT vendor solution or service. That can be health systems, hospitals, clinics, health plans on the payor side. We have some other markets that are much smaller but this report is exclusively focused on the hospitals and clinics and their research needs.

It was interesting, I inherited the space. We were doing research in EHR and areas like clinical decision support, the UpToDates and the DynaMeds of the world, and we started hearing from hospital and clinic and physician group leadership with interest  in these new tools, some of which we measured in the report like TransformativeMed, Navina, Regard.  Our clients were asking for something that would help them get more out of their EHR and the information that’s in there without needing to spend more time sifting through the information.

It honestly started organically as a one-off basis with interest in Navina, TransformativeMed, Regard, ultimately culminating into some early preliminary research and we tied the space together. These are all solutions that are trying to tackle very similar problems with relatively similar approaches.

We pulled the report together and created a new emerging category. It’s kind of like discovering a new species where we’re not quite sure exactly what parameters are around it but there’s a lot of energy from these physicians and these nurses and these clinicians saying “man, it’s awesome! I don’t have to document nearly as often. I don’t have to document as late. I don’t have to go take my charts home and do chart review and documentation late into the night nearly as often when I’m using these tools.” It’s exciting to be in this position to see these technologies really coming out and making a difference for our care providers.

Anthony: Great points. If we think about the genesis of this, you’re not going to have CIOs and CTOs sitting there going I think we could make our clinicians more efficient. It’s not how it goes down. It goes down when they get angry. You talked about working late, right? They go home, they chart, it’s miserable. This is all related to burnout.

In my mind, that’s the progression. It’s unhappy clinicians and that gets back to leadership. Hey, Mr. and Mrs. CIO, do something, because they don’t like this stuff. It’s not working for them. To me, that’s what this is. That’s what these technologies are. It’s a way to assuage or to improve that experience, correct?

Jackson: I 100% agree. If you look back at the Meaningful Use journey of how these EHRs were developed, a lot of hard work was put into making these systems compliant, making sure that these systems supported IT infrastructures, that they worked within a growing and evolving IDN system of hospitals and clinics all trying to connect one to another. But ultimately, the requirements for billing, the requirements for coding, the requirements for that IT infrastructure did have an impact on the clinicians. It impacted the frontline folks who are taking care of us and our family members.

These systems that we’re seeing in this new category of clinician digital workflow acknowledges the EHRs are great at what they do but want to make them better at making a clinicians life easier.

Anthony: But I have to believe there’s some frustration.  EHRs are an enormous investment and it must be frustrating to then have to buy something else to make it more useable and keep the physicians happy.

I get the necessity of it. But number 1, there’s not a lot of money to throw around in health systems. But we’re not talking about big margins. There’s probably some that just can’t do this. They can’t spend it and they’re just going to have to do the best they can without an extra tool.

Jackson: Yeah, I would say that. There’s definitely frustration and the margins are slim. I think that’s a big challenge, and probably a challenge that this category has overall. Is it’s not like it’s a revenue cycle tool with clear ROIs.

You have to see that you have a challenge with your clinicians and their satisfaction and their longevity at your organization and it’s worth the investment. Not to say that there are outcomes that can be interpreted to be on the revenue side but it’s not as one to one as saying “hey, I’m going to implement a revenue tool and I’m going to increase my collections.” It’s not going to have that same effect.

Anthony: Yeah, soft ROI is difficult. Let’s talk about how stuff is hard to find in an EHR. Clinicians have to do a lot of clicking around. AI is coming in handy everywhere and this is no different.  Is AI really what makes the tools work because it’s grabbing all the data.

Jackson:  It’s interesting. I’ve been in healthcare long enough to know that there’s a buzz around generative AI. But there’s been AI discussed in the space for years, even before the generative AI trend that’s happened in the last just couple of years. These companies that we measured in this report have been around for a while. I just spoke with a customer today who said that they’ve been working with the product for about 10 years.

Anthony: Oh wow.

Jackson: The implications of AI is not necessarily just to summarize notes. From a clinicians standpoint, it can look at the context of their role, what patient they are seeing, recent medical history. We can determine what are the pieces of information that need to be brought to the surface. The success of these tools and the energy and the excitement in the market around these tools is aided by that excitement that’s coming around generative AI.

The implications of further optimizing some of those pieces by knowing that AI will get even better about what information to summarize. Or on the flipside, you think about documentation, can you take a risk score for a patient and then have generative AI summarize that into a structured note – you can look make a few edits, populate it into the EHR and it goes to all the places that it needs to within the EHR, decreasing that documentation time.

That’s where AI does have the opportunity to really make a difference. You know folks are saying that it’s making a difference, looking at the report, all of these vendors are scoring incredibly well which means their customers are happy, they’re saying it’s worth the investment, it’s worth the time that they’re spending to get it set up and the resources they’re spending there. The implications there is it’s driving outcomes.

Anthony: We would assume on the health system end, they are surveying the user base asking what they would hope to see is increased satisfaction scores,  then they talk to KLAS and report that these tools are working out, right?

Jackson: 100%. That is the goal. You want to be able to say things are better because we brought this in, 100%.

Anthony: You feel like that’s the case because otherwise these vendors wouldn’t be scoring well?

Jackson: I think so. Yeah, and again, it’s still a new market but these early adopters are saying that it’s worth their time. They’re planning on sticking with the tools. We just need to see more adoption across the market or before we can say that this definitely is making a big sustainable repeatable difference.

Anthony: Very good. How would you say the EHR vendors are playing with these 0ptimization tools? If somebody says oh, we have this tool that’s going to make your tool better, the EHR vendor might get offended. Are Epic and then Oracle/Cerner, MediTech, are they very open to working with these helper systems?

Jackson:  I’ll answer this with a caveat of since we’re still early, I only have very, very anecdotal information and most of the time we’re speaking with customers who have been successful with those integrations. We’re not talking with folks who have said we really want to do that project but we just can’t get our EHR to come to the table. We’re not seeing that yet. I don’t have a lot of evidence to say “yeah, they are or are not.” There’s evidences of them working well with some of these folks.

You mentioned Oracle. One of the vendors mentioned in the report TransformativeMed. We found in the report is that they work with others as well but that’s really kind of where cut their teeth. They’re specialist in that field. It seems like each of the vendors that we measured has a different category where they specialize. Again, since they’re early, they want to learn one EHR. They want to learn what it takes to interface and what those clinicians need on a regular basis, what are the things that they’re looking at. I would say for right now, it seems like the EHR vendors are playing ball.

I know anecdotally there are some vendors in the category, not in EHR, but the vendors in the report, who have not yet completely come to the table or they’re preferring to work with one system over another. But there’s not much else that I would say that EHRs are antagonistic to this. I don’t think that we’re quite at that point.

Anthony: Any other thoughts you have on the report, things that I’m missing, interesting points or points you want to make, are there any particular vendors that are covered?

Jackson: I would say nothing that comes to mind. Doing a report in an early category like this, it’s an interesting endeavor because it’s a little bit like going out on a fishing expedition. Because there’s just so many unknowns about the category that you don’t quite know what to expect. I was very happy to see that all vendors in the report are driving outcomes. That seems to be clear.

It’s been interesting to see that all of the vendors in the report are seeing continual growth and their customer base, we’re planning on working towards this being a Best in KLAS category in the coming years which means there needs to be more adoption, more growth. It seems like most the vendors in the category are in a good trajectory to do that.

Another arm of KLAS does an arch collaborative where they partner with a health system to help them measure their efforts to improve clinician satisfaction specific to the EHR. We do some initial research and then again three to six months after they implement one of the tools and see what has changed.

We’re still waiting to do that, we need more folks to adopt the tools. But the opportunity around this area is exciting. We all would be better off if our doctors are more efficient in their workflows. They also need a work-life balance so that they’re not burned out of their work so they can take better care of us.

Anthony: 100%, it makes perfect sense. I think that what we want to come from this interview, what you want to come from your report is for the IT executives that know they have a problem, know that this is something to look at and this another possible option for you to improve that user experience. Would that be correct?

Jackson: Yes. This should be considered. There’s tons of options for improving clinician efficiency, that’s kind of like the macro for all of this.  This should be a weapon in the arsenal.

Anthony: Perfectly stated. I’m sure your report will help them navigate the space. Jackson, I want to thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Jackson: Absolutely. Thanks, Anthony.