10/05/2022

Souped-Up Search Results: How They Save Clinicians Time

Healthwise Communications Team

Let’s be honest, you’re probably not going to read this whole blog post. If you’re like most people, you’ll read about 20% of the text. It has become human nature to scan instead of reading everything word for word. Not only do we feel a time crunch, but every day we consume four times more information than we did just 20 years ago (and 90 times more information than in 1940!). It’s no wonder we’re looking to save time and quickly get the information we need.

The same applies to people working in healthcare. Clinician burnout has risen to all-time highs, physicians report feeling rushed in 66% of their visits, and 60% of physicians attribute their burnout to administrative tasks. One way to relieve the clinician time crunch and give them more time with patients is by streamlining their workflows—and that’s a top priority for Healthwise^® Advise^™.

Healthwise Advise makes finding and sharing health education a snap with two new innovations that give clinicians the information they need at a glance: purpose metadata and learning objectives. Not only do these innovations make life easier for clinicians, but they’re useful behind the scenes as well.

Purpose metadata: Easy-to-scan labels

Purpose metadata helps clinicians quickly understand a piece of education’s purpose—why it was created and how it will help patients. Healthwise offers 21 purpose categories such as how-to steps, decision support, and pre- and post-op instructions, and each piece of education fits into one or more categories. This information is coded behind the scenes and shows up in the Healthwise Advise interface as a small gray chip below each piece of education. These chips make it easy for clinicians to skim a list and understand how the education will serve the patient without clicking through and reading it.

For example, a clinician is preparing a patient for an upper GI endoscopy. The clinician can quickly scan the list of intelligently recommended education to find the Pre-Op Instructions and send them to the patient with just a couple clicks.

Learning objectives: Context at a glance

If the clinician wants even more context about a piece of education, they can read the learning objective. Learning objectives are common in educational settings—they describe what someone should know or understand after completing a lesson. You may have seen learning objectives on a class syllabus, or on a PowerPoint slide to help students understand what they will learn.

Similarly, in health education, the learning objectives that are paired with Healthwise education describe what the patient should know or understand after reading it. In this case, patients don’t actually see the learning objective, but the clinician does. In a list of search results, the learning objective is displayed beneath the education title, helping clinicians quickly determine which education best fits their patient.

For example, imagine the same clinician meeting with the patient to share treatment options for GERD. This time, the clinician is looking for basic information on medications. In the education list, not only can they see the purpose metadata chip, but they can also see the learning objective to further understand the education.

Right now, the patient just needs to learn about medications. So, the third option? Perfect. Click, click…and it’s sent to the patient.

How we got here

Based on these scenarios, it’s easy to assume purpose metadata and learning objectives will help clinicians. But we didn’t want to assume—we wanted to know for sure.

We worked with internal clinicians and health education experts, and we validated the approach with more than 90 external clinicians to make sure the purpose labels would be useful, intuitive, and clear. During this research, we heard from many clinicians who said even small workflow timesavers make a big difference. They noted that the purpose chips would help them easily skim a list to find what they need before they preview and ultimately assign education to patients. They also said including learning objectives in the user interface provides even more context at a glance.

Benefits go beyond clinicians

Yes, the metadata and learning objectives help clinicians, but there are behind-the-scenes benefits too. These better, easier-to-scan content descriptors also mean:

• Patients will receive more relevant education. As clinicians can clearly see what the education is about, they can provide patients with the most applicable education for their situations and place in their care journey.
• Content managers are can more easily identify education. When healthcare systems organize education to create content sets for common conditions or procedures, they can use metadata in reports to sort the content. The metadata will help them find the right education more easily and reduce redundancy in the types of education they include in their content sets.
• Organizations may one day have better ways to analyze engagement. Since learning objectives tell us what education is supposed to do, they also give us language to measure whether the education met patient goals. And the purpose metadata gives us another way to measure and analyze what type of education is used most often.

Purpose metadata and learning objectives save busy clinicians time by allowing effective scanning in a more streamlined workflow. So don’t waste any more time. Find out more about these innovations and the other ways Healthwise Advise can help your organization here.