NEWARK, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Wellsheet Inc., the company transforming workflow in the Electronic Health Record (EHR), announced today that its predictive clinical workflow platform has been selected to be deployed across the enterprise at 7 of the 11 hospitals at RWJBarnabas Health (RWJBH). Since implementing the system at their first two pilot sites, RWJBH has reduced the average time physicians spend in the EHR chart by approximately 40%. It has also increased patient throughput by 20% and produced improvements in care quality across these sites.
RWJBarnabas Health (RWJBH) is the largest integrated healthcare delivery system in New Jersey by way of serving more than 5 million patients annually, across nine counties, and employing 33,000 individuals, making it the state’s largest private employer. As a national health system leader, RWJBH recognizes clinician burnout as a complex workplace syndrome affecting not only physicians, nurses and staff who deliver care to patients, but also patients and their families. Executive leadership at RWJBH included clinician well-being among its strategic imperatives and recognizes it as crucial to achieving its mission of providing consistently outstanding levels of patient care services.
Spearheading an approach to improve this is Dr. Stephen O’Mahony, MD, FACP, Vice President and Chief Health Information Officer (CHIO) at RWJBarnabas Health.
“The clinical team understands that the electronic health record (EHR) helps the organization maintain the highest quality and safety standards,” said Dr. Stephen O’Mahony. “Clinicians are spending way too much time entering data into the EHR, and then searching for that data to pull it back out of the EHR to support clinical decisions and patient care. Wellsheet lives on top of the EHR and knows who I am as a provider, who this patient is, and provides me with the data I need in a way that is really easy to digest. It helps show our physicians a total picture of the patient and highlights care gaps, opportunities, and how to best treat the patient in real time. It’s all wrapped up in a package that’s easy to understand and navigate and it can save our physicians a couple of hours each day, which they appreciate.”
Implementing a Predictive Clinical Workflow
After completing a thorough assessment of major EHR pain points, Dr. O’Mahony and his team realized that instead of requiring clinicians to hunt through different pages in the EHR chart to find needed information, they needed the ability to gather pertinent patient information in one place.
Wellsheet’s AI- powered predictive clinical workflow platform pulls data from the EHR chart, prioritizes clinical content through specialized machine learning algorithms, and optimizes the provider workflow. Wellsheet assembles pertinent information in a meaningful way, anticipating the needs of the doctor to help facilitate a more effortless episode of care. It assembles the right information in an intuitive workflow that allows providers to arrive at the right clinical insights. Having this layer on top of the EHR gives clinicians the ability to understand what needs to be done for the patient right in front of them without having to compromise the provider-patient interaction.
Ease of implementation
Traditional implementation timelines to integrate new technology with the EHR are usually prolonged, cumbersome and costly affairs. Wellsheet used the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) application programming interfaces (APIs), and can pull and prioritize key patient data from multiple data sources for an accelerated implementation and deployment timeline. It also extends the experience to any web browser and any device, such as a tablet or mobile phone, with the same fidelity, and look and feel, across different environments. This is a huge plus for clinicians working across various sites of service in the same facility, or across different EHRs between facilities and different health systems. Wellsheet is a complementary and seamless part of the EHR, not an add-on that requires a separate login and password.
“Typically, whenever you are dealing with changes to the EHR, you are looking at a long development cycle. It can take many, many months — even years,” said Dr. O’Mahony. “Through use of Wellsheet’s API-based integration, we were able to easily and securely implement the application at a pace we’d never seen before and had Wellsheet up and running within a few weeks.”
Provider Wellness
The positive clinician response at RWJBarnabas Health was so significant that the healthcare system quickly advanced the project in a matter of months from a small trial of 20 doctors to more than 1000 physicians across a variety of specialties to an enterprise deployment.
“Wellsheet was built with clinician’s natural workflow in mind to transform the clinical design and usability of the EHR, reduce time spent in the EHR, and reduce physician burnout,” said Craig Limoli, CEO and founder of Wellsheet. “We are grateful to work with a trailblazer like Dr. Stephen O’Mahony and an innovative organization like RWJBarnabas Health, who recognize at the highest level, and are addressing, the importance of clinician well-being and reducing physician burnout.”
“We need to keep investing in our physicians to improve wellness,” said Dr. O’Mahony. “It’s imperative that we find ways to support and give back to the clinicians and other staff who are delivering frontline care day in and day out. In doing so, you not only support them, but you also support the collective mission of every caregiver and every health system to deliver the highest quality care possible to patients. If we don’t make it a priority, if we don’t give them tools like Wellsheet to help with the EHR burden, it will be an uphill climb.”
Learn more about RWJBarnabas Health’s deployment of Wellsheet by watching a video of RWJBH physicians using Wellsheet, joining a webinar with Dr. O’Mahony on September 23, 2020 at 2:00 PM ET, or reading an RWJBH case study.
About Wellsheet
Wellsheet’s predictive clinical workflow platform uses the FHIR API standards to work within an existing EHR to surface the most relevant content for physicians in a view that is contextualized and prioritized for their needs. Its AI-powered, cloud-based intuitive workflow is integrated with both Epic and Cerner to reduce a physician’s time in the EHR, lessening physician burnout and improving the quality of patient care. Wellsheet’s SaaS-based offering is deployed in large healthcare providers. Learn more at www.Wellsheet.com or follow us on Twitter @Wellsheet_Inc
RWJBarnabas Health is an investor in Newark Venture Partners Fund, LP, an early stage venture fund based in Newark, N.J., which has invested in Wellsheet.
