How Can Efficiency of Primary Care Patient Encounters Be Improved?

Most family physicians likely have wondered at the end of a particularly frustrating day why certain technologies or systems -- say, for instance, electronic health records (EHRs) -- that were created with the best of intentions to make providing health care easier instead make patient encounters more cumbersome and inefficient.

The answer, according to authors of new research(jamia.oxfordjournals.org) published Sept. 2 online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, is the unpredictable nature of the primary care physician's (PCP's) workflow.

In an article titled "The myth of standardized workflow in primary care," authors said, "In order to develop solutions to address care delivery problems, e.g., EHR integration, it is critical to understand the details of primary care workflows. This can only happen if the basic science of the primary care workflow is understood."

Corresponding author Talley Holman, Ph.D., M.B.A., an industrial engineer and senior e-health systems analyst for the AAFP's Alliance for eHealth Innovation, toldAAFP News that the people who design workflows for physician offices -- such as industrial engineers and computer scientists -- have, for years, created tools such as EHRs assuming that PCPs worked in a linear or predictable fashion.

"Workflows were not understood, and designers made the assumption that patient encounters were similar," said Holman.