Sarah Bush Lincoln combats nursing staff burnout with Oracle Health
The Illinois regional hospital optimizes critical care, ICU, and medical-surgical workflows using Oracle Health Essential Clinical Dataset.
“An optimized ECD impacts patient satisfaction. It gives more time at the bedside rather than sitting at the computer.”
Tackling challenges
In a post-COVID world, challenges associated with burnout in hospitals have only increased. Many pain points include documentation burden, alert fatigue, bottlenecked workflows, and manual redundancies. According to the American Medical Informatics Association, documentation burden leads to decreased job satisfaction, increased medical errors, and hospital-acquired conditions. In its mission to provide exceptional care, Sarah Bush Lincoln Health System looked for a partner to help develop more streamlined and efficient documentation processes. To help the organization document the right information at the right time for patients, Sarah Bush decided to implement Oracle Health Essential Clinical Dataset (ECD), part of Oracle Health EHR. Hospital leaders realized Oracle’s ECD would help maximize overall clinical efficiency for nurses.
“In my experience, when I felt burnout, it was because there was just too much charting, too many patients coming in and out, and too high of acuity. Changing the documentation with the ECD definitely makes a difference, because you have those extra minutes to do the other things you need to do.” Katie Dittamore, Director of Clinical Informatics, Sarah Bush Lincoln
Increasing compliance, decreasing steps
After implementing Oracle Health Essential Clinical Dataset (ECD), the hospital optimized its nursing documentation process for patient physical assessments. Key areas included critical care, intensive care, and med-surg. To exclude unnecessary discrete task assays (DTAs) and increase compliance with answering necessary questions, Sarah Burton Lincoln targeted intensive care and med-surg nurses. For critical and intensive care, the hospital achieved a nearly 50% decrease in the number of DTAs, totaling a difference of 269 DTAs that clinicians no longer needed to chart.1 Across med-surg, DTAs decreased by 82, totaling a 19% reduction.2 Additionally, the hospital saw benefits in both user engagement data and time saved. Across critical care, average clicks per patient encounter day in the ICU dropped by 12%, or 101 clicks on average.3 In med-surg, the average clicks per patient encounter day decreased 51 clicks, for a 17% reduction.4
ECD optimization for the ICU also reduced average band time per patient encounter day by 2 minutes and 48 seconds, or 10%.5 Med-surg saw a 14% decrease in the average band time per patient encounter day, realizing over 1 minutes and 13 seconds of time savings.6 With time re-allocated and pressure points relieved, clinicians gained more time to provide personalized care. “Overall, it helps the patients get in and out of here a little bit quicker,” says Dittamore. “We continue to do things that will improve employee satisfaction from a medical record standpoint. And we will always do whatever we can to take care of our patients, making things more efficient for everyone.”
1Comparing data from February 20, 2022 to May 20, 2022 against data from February 20, 2023 to May 20, 2023.
2Comparing data from February 20, 2022 to May 20, 2022 against data from February 20, 2023 to May 20, 2023.
3Comparing data from February 20, 2022 to May 20, 2022 against data from February 20, 2023 to May 20, 2023. Total number of clicks for patients entire stay, divided by the number of calendar days of the stay. Clicking refers to tabbing or refreshing elements in the chart. Data compiled only for RN and ICU RN positions.
4Comparing data from February 20, 2022 to May 20, 2022 against data from February 20, 2023 to May 20, 2023. Total number of clicks for patients entire stay, divided by the number of calendar days of the stay. Clicking refers to tabbing or refreshing elements in the chart. Data compiled only for RN and ICU RN positions.
5Comparing data from February 20, 2022 to May 20, 2022 against data from February 20, 2023 to May 20, 2023. Total amount of active time on the band for patient’s entire stay divided by the number of calendar days. Active time includes clicking or hovering over items in the chart. Data compiled only for RN and ICU RN positions.
6Comparing data from February 20, 2022 to May 20, 2022 against data from February 20, 2023 to May 20, 2023. Data compiled only for RN and ICU RN positions.
About the customer
Sarah Bush Lincoln is a prominent Magnet-designated healthcare organization. As a 145-bed, nonprofit hospital centrally located in Illinois' Coles County, Sarah Bush Lincoln has been providing its region with equitable care through the implementation of breakthrough innovations for more than 45 years.