The healthcare industry has been rapidly innovating over the past decade, but it is no secret to adoption. Sometimes, I even find myself doubting the technology my hospital encourages us to adopt. After deciding to select the “Solution on Shelf” solution (EHR) from our Electronic Health Record (EHR), this usually looks like it’s been told. Many times, “good enough” solutions are poorly designed, clumsy to use, and lack motivation or reinforcement behavior, so clinicians like me don’t use them. It’s not because of the lack of desire to participate, their work is not worth the effort. While many advances in EHR tools such as EPIC’s Mychart and Large Language Model (LLM) are progressive and exciting, it is not without the marks of a large number of surgeons and can actually improve our daily experiences to improve our patient care habits.
But the problem is not the ability of these tools – many show hope to disrupt the status quo of health care operations and improve the lives of health care workers. The real problem with clinicians is the lack of collaboration and inclusion with health system and solution developers throughout the development process.
Today’s AI solutions are often designed and implemented with limited clinician opinions, limited adoption and real impact. However, in other areas, this is not the case. Consider the space for medical equipment. The United States has long been a leader in the field, and the products developed have been a transformation in patient care and surgeons’ daily lives. Why is this the case? I think the success of the industry is based on the depth of the relationship between surgeons and industry partners.
For example, novel tools such as surgical augmented reality (AR) glasses include surgeon involvement through developmental stages, are disrupting the teaching of complex surgeries and hopefully meaningfully improve intraoperative planning and intraoperative techniques for surgical and neurosurgery. Unlike robotic surgery, the product is designed by a surgeon. Just like a robot, we can expect surgeons everywhere to embrace new technology when it addresses huge demand and is the best breed. The problem is that our tech colleagues know how to make beautiful products, but most people don’t work in the four walls of healthcare and rarely in the operating room. As a result, they don’t know what will work, or what will drive engagement. That’s why they need our calibration, the best calibration.
The ultimate fact is that developing the right solution requires partnerships: between clinicians and technicians.
Why did collaboration crash?
On the one hand, even if the impact of the medical operation affected by the software on patient quality has the same effect as the physical tools we use between closure and cutting, medical software is handled differently than medical devices. Another is that some people’s default location is to accept whatever “good enough” the EHR offers without having to review whether it meets the needs that drive clinical adoption. Too blindly believe that EHR can be the best of everything, rather than adopting an open and weird mindset to welcome competition as a tool to drive progress.
To be fair, there are some highlights in the health system, some technicians Do Actively listen to their clinicians, seek out the best things, not just what is considered easy, and actively engage the partner community with an open mind. As clinicians, we also take some responsibilities. The sad truth is that surgeons have been disillusioned and have lost real change to the feedback they have spent hours giving countless committees. These committees generally do not provide changes that clinicians are looking for. At best, EHR vendors will take what we ask for and provide us with half the ideal solution, and at worst, please make sure we offer a complete solution that will be available in an uncertain timeline.
Health systems have not implemented the correct surgical solutions to provide ROI
Health system executives, on the other hand, are feeling increased pressure to incorporate new tools into their technology stack to address inefficiencies and improve patient care, but they don’t usually delegate decision-making power to clinical staff, who will become the primary users of these tools.
Many tools are described as groundbreaking for health systems, but often provide basic advice without providing a viable next step or affecting clinical decision-making. Take the EHR platform as an example. They all claim to improve patient care by accessing millions of health care data available faster. Nevertheless, they often do not have the ability to make the data useful to us and our patients. If the surgeon cannot contact the patient until 3-5 days before the operation and there is not enough time to capture the possible missed indications, such as stopping the medication, the operation will be delayed, causing additional distress during an already difficult patient period. Additionally, the dominance of EHR suppliers that push their tools to hospitals is limited in conducting competitive innovation. This creates an atmosphere of comprehensive and inefficient products, and the task of hospital staff is to learn how to use them.
How do healthcare innovators prioritize collaboration?
We have reached the intersection, but the path forward is clearer than ever. The industry is eager to collaborate and pay more attention to surgeons’ participation in creating groundbreaking solutions. When choosing tools that affect patient care, surgeons need to comment and developers will need to shift their focus to developing solutions that address real-world challenges in surgery.
Essentially, surgeons are tinkerers, and they can drive fundamental improvements in care when tools that are allowed to contribute to the use of daily. Collaboration needs to be changed; however, unless this approach is considered regularly, the healthcare industry will continue to fight technology adoption and surgeons will continue to operate in an efficient environment.
Photo: dmitrii_guzhanin, Getty Images
Dr. David Atashroo is the chief medical officer for the perioperative period of Qventus. In this role, he leads the design and orientation of Qventus perioperative solutions that use AI and automation to optimize or leverage and drive strategic surgical growth. He holds a MD from Columbia University in Missouri and trained in plastic surgery at the University of Kentucky before completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University School of Medicine. In addition to his role in Qventus, Dr. Atashroo continues his clinical practice at the University of California Francisco.
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