ROCKVILLE, MD - The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) is proud to announce leadership of AMIA 25x5 – an effort to reduce the U.S. clinical documentation burden. AMIA will advance the action plan and recommendations established in early 2021 by the 25x5 Symposium to Reduce Documentation Burden on U.S. Clinicians by 75% by 2025, a National Library of Medicine-funded initiative with partnership among AMIA, Vanderbilt University and Columbia University.
Documentation burden, which has gained increasing attention over the last few years as electronic health record (EHR) use has increased, is the stress imposed by the excessive work required to generate clinical records of healthcare-related interactions. The burden of clinical documentation on professionals has had a proven negative impact on health care. This burden leads to a variety of negative outcomes including clinician burnout and decreased job satisfaction, increased medical errors and hospital-acquired conditions.
"Reducing documentation burden on U.S. clinicians is an urgent priority within the health care community," said AMIA Board Chair and President Gretchen Purcell Jackson, MD, PhD, FACS, FACMI, FAMIA, Vice President and Scientific Medical Officer, Intuitive Surgical and Associate Professor of Surgery, Pediatrics, and Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center. "AMIA has the best access to those with the subject matter expertise necessary to tackle this challenge. Bringing together health systems, providers, vendors, and policy advocates along with the expertise of the AMIA membership is integral to moving forward on these efforts."
In early March, AMIA established a 25x5 Task Force chaired by Sarah Rossetti, PhD, RN, FACMI, FAMIA, FAAN with Kenrick Cato, RN, PhD, CPHIMS, FAAN acting as the AMIA Board of Directors Liaison. The 25x5 Task Force convenes more than 20 AMIA members divided into three separate workstreams based on expertise: Health Systems/Providers, Health IT Vendor, Policy and Advocacy.
The mission of the Task Force is to reduce documentation burden for U.S. clinicians to 25% of current state in the next five years and optimize EHR and related vendor solutions by prioritizing and implementing the 25x5 Symposium calls to action and recommendations through partnerships and advocacy with health systems, professional societies, and public/private sector organizations in order to spread these solutions across the U.S. health system.
"I am proud to lead AMIA’s efforts in this critical initiative," said AMIA 25x5 Task Force Chair Sarah Rossetti. "Working collectively with Vanderbilt, AMIA and Columbia provided significant discovery for the recommendations and calls to action that we can now move forward with, using the expertise of our Task Force."
With an overall goal to affect change and drive completion of the symposium action items, AMIA will guide workflows and innovation to optimize clinical documentation from its current state to information tools that support the delivery of safe, high quality, high value, continuous patient care. As part of this vision, billing requirements, medicolegal issues, and regulatory requirements, should be reduced, eliminated, or automated where possible, or rely on parallel documentation that does not require any effort by the clinician, where appropriate. Fundamental to this initiative is the broad recognition that documentation for these nonclinical purposes should not engage the clinician’s time and attention. The Task Force is focused on all types of health professionals. Solutions will seek to eliminate unnecessary documentation all together and will not shift work from one clinician to another clinician.
More than 300 participants from approximately 140 organizations attended the 2021 Symposium. Attendees included stakeholders from clinical settings, academia, research, industry (including EHR vendors and innovative start-up companies), government agencies, payors, professional organizations, and patients. The Symposium Summary Report includes strategies and approaches aimed to reduce clinician documentation burden on U.S. clinicians by 75% and identifies 82 prioritized action items across four themes: Accountability, Evidence Matters, Education and Training, and Innovation of Technology.
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AMIA, the leading professional association for informatics professionals, is the center of action for 5,500 informatics professionals from more than 65 countries. As the voice of the nation’s top biomedical and health informatics professionals, AMIA and its members play a leading role in assessing the effect of health innovations on health policy, and advancing the field of informatics. AMIA actively supports five domains in informatics: translational bioinformatics, clinical research informatics, clinical informatics, consumer health informatics, and public health informatics.