Re-engineering the Healthcare Team: Meeting the needs of Providers with Information Specialists

Implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) impacts provider workflow at the point-of-care. Information access and data entry tasks have been appended to provider workload, adversely affecting clinical workflow as well as provider cognitive resources and job satisfaction. The quantity and complexity of information required for patient care and the documentation required for administrative and medico-legal purposes is expanding rapidly, leading to ever-increasing impacts on provider cognitive function. We addressed these challenges by introducing a new member into the healthcare team whose role is to function as the intermediary between the provider and the information system. We have shown that re-engineering the healthcare team in a large otolaryngology practice through the addition of information specialists has increased productivity. “Off-loading” provider information system tasks to an information specialist optimizes provider-patient interaction by reducing provider cognitive workload while simultaneously improving efficiency, documentation, and revenue.