Why Does AI Inside the EHR Matter Now?
It’s crucial for your medical practice to identify bottlenecks that hinder efficiency and prevent your staff from engaging with patients to their full potential. A case in point is the time and effort required for clinical documentation.
Documentation is one of the largest contributors to provider burnout. Numerous clerical tasks have now become the responsibility of physicians, as explained by The Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, which reported on medical workers experiencing higher workloads and increased stress.
The sheer amount of information they must examine, coupled with the resulting cognitive load (and cognitive fatigue), makes burnout a worrisome aspect of working with patient data, even within a standard electronic health record (EHR) system.
This is why AI in EHR matters more than ever before. AI clinical documentation improves EHR usability, such as during the intense after-hours charting work that remains a major challenge for many practices. We’ve determined that AI is most effective when we build it to integrate directly with the EHR, rather than bolting it onto electronic health record software.
What Is BenchmarkAI?
BenchmarkAI is a set of artificial intelligence-powered tools now available within Benchmark EHR. We designed it to focus on supporting clinical documentation. BenchmarkAI is never meant to “replace” clinicians, but only to assist them.
The AI lets you ask questions inside the EHR to get immediate responses to your coding or medical questions, without needing to look at a second screen.
Rather than spending an inordinate amount of time manually reviewing a patient’s chart, clinicians can instantly receive a one-click summary of the previous visits, diagnoses, and treatments. Your team will be empowered to make more accurate decisions, faster. Indeed, our tests demonstrate that BenchmarkAI can decrease your documentation time by up to 40%.
Humans are always directly involved in the documentation process and are in charge of making decisions surrounding each patient’s plan of care. When using our built-in AI medical scribe and seeing summaries of patient charts, you should know that all outputs must be reviewed and made final by the provider, and not by AI software tools.
How Does AI-Assisted Clinical Documentation Enable Less Typing, More Patient Focus?
When you enable AI assisted clinical notes, you’ll benefit from ambient listening and AI assisted summaries, which reduce your team’s need to do manual note entry. For context, Mass General Brigham reported the results of a recent study showing that ambient clinical documentation technology supported by artificial intelligence reduced burnout by 21.2% over 84 days.
This means that using AI tools for independent medical practices enables providers to maintain eye contact and conversation flow with their patients. The system helps you create notes faster for clinician review, which are then automatically stored in the EHR for any member of your team to access later.
How Can BenchmarkAI Improve the Provider Experience Without Compromising Accuracy?
Artificial intelligence has the potential to streamline medical providers’ workflows “and enhance diagnostic accuracy,” according to a report from the journal Preventing Chronic Disease. However, humans must always remain in the loop to review that the data is correct. PCD noted that when a dataset is incomplete, AI systems might fail to learn relevant patterns associated with the broader community of patients. This can occur, for example, when certain demographic groups are underrepresented in clinical trials.
Accordingly, BenchmarkAI supports documentation by people, with clinical decision-making staying with the experienced, knowledgeable clinical providers on your team.
The presence of AI tools built into EHR systems does not mean your documentation process will become fully automated. Your protocols must emphasize human reviewed AI clinical notes, as AI is no substitute for the judgment of licensed medical professionals.
Why Does EHR-Embedded AI Make a Difference?
Artificial intelligence operating inside the existing Benchmark EHR workflow allows your clinicians to focus on the task at hand, without needing to switch between systems. This reduces friction and prevents nurses and doctors from experiencing cognitive overload.
You’ll see that AI supports the development of consistent, structured clinical documentation. It’s also more flexible than traditional EHRs because it provides internal support with troubleshooting capabilities. What’s more, it’s designed for future modifications, so we can readily add new features to ensure BenchmarkAI becomes more robust, going forward.
How Can BenchmarkAI Improve Your Accuracy and the Patient Experience?
Benchmark Solutions has integrated artificial intelligence tools into our electronic health record system to help medical practices review staff-patient interactions, gain greater oversight into how their practice is running, and improve accuracy.
For example, the AI chat assistant in benchmark EHR enables your team to conveniently post questions while they’re inside the database and get an immediate response to their coding or medical questions, with no need to switch focus and look at another screen.
Instead of spending an inordinate amount of time reviewing patients’ charts, providers use our AI Health summary tool to instantly get one-click summaries of their previous visits, diagnoses, and treatment plans.
Medical practices use Benchmark’s AI-powered scribe to obtain an instant visit summary based on an ambient recording of doctor-patient conversations converted to text. This documentation is easy for clinicians to review and approve. Doing so gives your team more time to focus on patient care.
Our goal is to help you improve the efficiency of each patient visit and support better patient interactions. BenchmarkAI will never replace clinical judgement. It’s a tool that gives you better review capabilities and boosts documentation accuracy.