How Three Healthcare Organizations Strengthen Their PCPs Mental Health 

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and advocates have organized around themes that emphasize the need for stable environments, strong communities, and ready access to services. Yet, the Primary Care Practitioners (PCPs) who are on the front lines providing these services are currently experiencing an almost 63% burnout rate and a stark decrease in work/life integration satisfaction.

To alleviate the staggering burnout rate and in hopes of helping PCPs find harmony in their personal and professional lives, the following healthcare systems have employed data and analytic solutions to create better working conditions and improve patient care.

Lessening the EHR Documentation Burden

Primary care providers spend more than half their workday—nearly six hours each day—interacting with the EHR. Community Health Network (CHNw) recognized that their PCPs were struggling with the administrative burden of EHR documentation, impacting their ability to provide superior care. To address this, CHNw leveraged the Health Catalyst’s data platform and the Health Catalyst Embedded Care Gaps™ application, which supplies providers with tailored patient information at the point of care. The solution also automates visit agendas and actionable procedure orders, reducing the time providers must spend searching for care gap data. 

CHNw’s use of analytics applications made the documentation process easier for PCPs and office staff. In so doing, the organization reduced costs by eliminating the need for EHR tool development and fostered a safe space for providers. In addition to boosting morale, this application resulted in the closure of over 373,000 care gaps in six months, generating a 4X value realization, improving provider workflow, and stimulating value-based care performance.

Generating Meaningful, Informative Quality Metrics

Quality metrics that are meaningful, informative, and easy to track can help alleviate the stress levels of PCPs and support their mental health as providers strive to find purpose in their work.

Mass General Brigham implemented a new analytics tool to endow clinicians with real-time insights, making answers to questions such as, “How am I doing right now,” “How am I doing over time,” “How am I doing compared to others,” and “How can I do better,” easier to come by.

They also used this tool to adopt the concept of registries to define patient populations and modified metrics to make them more clinically meaningful for a specific subset of patients.

After overcoming barriers to adoption, Mass General Brigham automated the new metrics and registries, making data more readily accessible through the combined use of the EHR and the Health Catalyst data platform. As a result, RSOs, clinical practices, and providers made significant gains, including the following: 

• 85 percent of clinicians surveyed felt that the new metrics helped them take better care of their patients.
• Quality improved at an unprecedented rate on an all-payer population, five times that of the standard pay-for-performance population.
• Near real-time measurement using clinical data eliminated months-long delays, while run charts and provider and clinic-comparison views turbo-charged quality improvement.
• 125 percent increase in user adoption of the analytic tool (99 unique users, 674 unique sessions, and rising).

Empowering PCP Improvement Efforts Through Actionable Data 

As the world of healthcare shifts toward value-based care, physicians are finding themselves facing a new set of challenges. For one, they must contend with the rising cost pressures from commercial health insurers and government payers. Compounding these challenges is the increased burden of reporting requirements.  To maintain their autonomy, independent physician groups must adopt new technologies to reduce and streamline costs, adapt to changes associated with value-based care, and exhibit continuous improvement. 

Acuitas Health empowered physicians with the expertise and resources they needed to successfully transition to a value-based care delivery system while preserving the independent practice of medicine. The population health services company adopted the Health Catalyst data platform to engage practitioners in the analysis of clinical and operational data to identify patterns, trends, and opportunities for improvement. The platform enabled Acuitas Health to gain actionable insights from multiple data sets, empower professionals, and drive continuous improvements with ease.  

With access to relevant data, providers and their clinical teams unearthed new opportunities that had long flown under the radar, resulting in better engagement and more comprehensive utilization of up-to-the-minute information.

Caring for the Mental Health of PCPs

During Mental Health Awareness Month, healthcare organizations can showcase their innovative efforts in creating environments that prioritize the mental wellness of their PCPs.

These three organizations demonstrate how the effective use of data and analytic solutions can reduce the administrative burden of EHR documentation, generate meaningful quality metrics, and provide actionable data to engage providers in improvement efforts. Indeed, opportunities abound in leveraging healthcare data analytics platforms. With increased adoption, such tools have the potential to systematically change the medical profession to one where PCPs have improved work conditions, better support, and evidence-based models, which can significantly impact their well-being and that of their patients.