As an oncology nurse I know firsthand the challenges healthcare professionals face every day. Most are overworked, stressed, and pressed for time. Clinicians work long hours and are constantly multitasking. It is easy to fall behind or miss a detail when you’re juggling too many balls at once and don’t have all the tools and information you need to do your job.
Most doctors and nurses are passionate about their work and truly want to help people, but many are feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. According to a 2023 Medscape survey, burnout among physicians has reached 53%.
Burnout is bad for clinicians. It is bad for healthcare systems. And it is bad for patients. It leads to absenteeism, turnover, and staffing shortages. And it impacts clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction.
In my mind, anything we can do to help clinicians increase productivity, reduce stress and frustration, and improve care quality is a big win. That’s why I’m so excited about the new Clinical Timelines capability in InterSystems TrakCare®. Clinical Timelines provides unified visibility into patient data, helping clinicians simplify workflows and increase insights. By visualizing real-time and historical data and automating disjointed, manual processes we can help clinicians save time and effort, avoid mishaps, and make better-informed decisions.
Clinical Timelines is especially helpful in environments like operating theaters and critical-care settings, where visibility of the right data can have life-impacting implications. Today’s operating rooms and ICUs are awash in data. Connected medical devices and smart sensors generate a treasure-trove of patient data. But that data is often scattered across different systems and presented in different formats. Clinicians waste valuable time toggling between screens and correlating and analyzing data by hand. It is all too easy to overlook critical information, miss a trend, or even misdiagnose a condition when you don’t have a full, cohesive picture of a patient’s state and history.
Clinical Timelines gathers different types of data from different sources and presents it in a logical and consistent format. It eliminates inefficiencies and blind spots and distills raw data into meaningful information. It also improves continuity of care, ensuring the entire care team—surgeons, anesthesiologists, other doctors, ICU nurses, ward nurses, etc.—all have a complete and consistent view of clinical data throughout the patient journey. Cross-team communications and coordination were always a challenge at every hospital where I worked. Different departments and functions used different systems and tools, and important information sometimes slipped through the cracks.
With Clinical Timelines, all team members can document and view a wide range of patient information—physiological and other observational data, early warning scores, ventilation settings and parameters, clinical assessments, checklists, medications, results, clinical notes, fluid balance data, etc.—in a uniform manner, using a single user interface.
As the name implies, Clinical Timelines provides a chronological display of patient information that makes it easy to review actions, analyze events, and contextualize data. You can drill down on a particular moment or time range and select the specific data you want to observe and how you want to present it. You can correlate episodes, identify trends and patterns, and diagnose conditions—quickly and efficiently.
Clinical Timelines is integrated into the TrakCare encounter record. You can easily enter a note, add an order, or update a clinical form without the need to leave the clinical timeline. The integrated approach simplifies workflows and helps clinicians save time.
The Clinical Timelines interface is customizable; users can create their own views. We also designed the user interface around real-world workflows. We conducted extensive usability testing during development and incorporated feedback from a variety of customers and user types.
I think Clinical Timelines will be a game changer. Clinicians will spend less time sifting through data and charting, and more time focusing on what matters most—patient care.