Digital Health Week, a campaign led by Canada Health Infoway, is an annual celebration of digital health in Canada. This week is all about highlighting how digital health solutions are helping to improve the experiences of healthcare providers and helping to create a more connected, collaborative system for everyone.
These are goals that everyone at WELL Health feels passionately about. For Digital Health Week, here are some ways WELL’s Practitioner Enablement Platform can benefit healthcare providers.
What Digital Health Means for Canadian Healthcare Providers
For healthcare providers, digital health is about integrating technology into workflows to improve care delivery and outcomes while focusing more on medicine and less on time-consuming admin duties that contribute to burnout.
This integration is happening slowly in large part due to the fact digitization of outpatient medical clinic experiences is hard and because care providers are naturally focused on care and ensuring their clinics remain open and operational.
EMRs are now nearly universal in Canada, that’s a big change and has been a net positive for healthcare providers and patients. But beyond electronic medical records, many clinics still operate as they did twenty years ago while struggling to meet increased demand. And that isn’t the fault of healthcare providers, it’s harder than ever to run a clinic and manage a practice and we can’t expect care providers to be technologists and small business owners all while providing care.
An Example of a Non-Optimized Healthcare Provider’s Experience
Healthcare providers face significant challenges that digital health tools can help solve. For example, consider the different administrative tasks a physician encounters throughout their day.
Everything from billing submissions, charting, and paperwork to staff management and recruitment must be juggled alongside seeing patients, with as little as 30% of physician time spent on seeing patients. Across Canada, this has a knock-on impact on patients’ access to healthcare providers and contributes to the approximately 20% of Canadians who are currently without a family doctor.
All this administration places significant strain on care providers and their staff. Research shows that physicians and clinic teams in Canada spend on average 50% of their time on administration.
This lack of support for providers has a real impact on the productivity, professional fulfilment, and mental health of Canadian healthcare providers. In fact, nearly 60% of Canadian physicians say that their mental health has worsened since the start of the pandemic and over half of physicians attribute burnout to manual tasks like charting and paperwork.
How WELL’s Practitioner Enablement Platform Benefits Healthcare Providers
At WELL Health, we’re focusing on caring for care providers. We do that in many ways but supporting healthcare providers with digital health tools and services is our priority. By providing digital health tools and services, WELL can empower healthcare providers, whether they work in a WELL Clinic or are looking to optimize their own clinic.
An Illustrative Example of an Optimized Healthcare Provider Experience
The way we do that is with WELL’s Practitioner Enablement Platform.
The Practitioner Enablement Platform includes EMRs, like OSCAR Pro, and other leading digital tools and services, such as Ocean and DoctorCare. The goal is to automate the manual tasks and administration that prevent physicians from spending time with their patients and contributes towards burnout.
Implementation of digital tools and services can be about cost optimization as well as making the best and most valuable use of clinic staff’s time. For example, a service like DoctorCare greatly improves the efficiency of billing, allowing clinic staff to spend more time helping patients and supporting physicians.
The same can be said for tools like Ocean. These services empower patients with online booking options, self-check in, and digital patient intake forms while freeing staff up from answering endless phone calls and handling paper intake forms.
Most of the tools and services in our platform are available as fully integrated options within OSCAR Pro EMR, helping to streamline data flows and reducing administrative burdens. And for those working in WELL Health Clinics, IT and cybersecurity are also covered as part of the Practitioner Enablement Platform to help safeguard patient data.
We also understand that one of the underlying benefits of digital health initiatives is that there is a greater opportunity for collaboration and connectivity within an open and connected healthcare system. Tools like eReferrals and ePrescribing, and other digital tools, improve overall interconnectivity between clinics and care providers.
The primary benefit of WELL’s Practitioner Enablement Platform is a more optimized and well-supported experience for healthcare providers that values care over admin and provides a greater opportunity to focus on care delivery.
How Do Care Providers Access Well’s Practitioner Enablement Platform?
Currently, there are two ways to access WELL’s digital health tools and services.
The first is to join 2,300+ healthcare providers working in WELL’s fully managed WELL Health Clinics Network. In addition to leveraging WELL’s digital tools and services, these providers also benefit from a fully managed clinic environment including recruitment, staffing, billing, lease management, IT support and more.
The second way is WELL’s à la carte lineup of digital health tools and services all available through apps.health, WELL’s digital health marketplace. There are currently over 21,000+ Canadian providers benefitting from these digital health tools and services. OSCAR Pro and Intrahealth Profile customers can shop the full range of digital apps and services by visiting apps.health.
