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Hannah Soye, chief people and culture officer at employee experience platform Haiilo, says that we should be asking how we can streamline tools so healthcare workers do less.
Healthcare workers have never had access to more technology. Prescribing platforms, scheduling tools, patient records and internal messaging are all designed to make everyday tasks easier. But when healthcare employees spend more time switching between systems than using them, it is a sign that something has gone wrong with their integration and adoption.
With work spread across so many platforms, staff are too often left with the extra burden of choosing the right tool, searching for information quickly, re-entering context and trying to remember where they were before the last interruption.
More than half (53%) of healthcare workers spend at least 11% of their working week dealing with problems caused by fragmented workplace systems, research shows. In a typical full-time week, that is more than four hours spent navigating problems rather than doing the work itself. Over an entire year, this equates to five and a half weeks’ worth of time lost to tool management.
This is digital friction, and the healthcare industry is paying for it in what it can least afford to waste – people’s time and attention.
Why attention is the hidden cost
As technology and AI adoption increases, it can be easy to think that more tools make work more efficient.
While we have become very good at measuring technology adoption, knowing how many people logged in and their usage rates tells us very little about what it feels like to use it. But in the real world, now nearly two-thirds (64%) of healthcare workers often or always need to switch between multiple workplace tools to complete a single task.
The reality is that 59% use four or more workplace platforms during a typical working week. Every time they switch between them, it introduces another opportunity to lose context, interrupt concentration or simply forget where you were.
A high level of software adoption can create a blind spot around the people using them. Without consultation, it can be difficult to see that healthcare workers are quietly losing time trying to make them work. And when already-stretched workers have to spend their time working around the systems that are supposed to support them, the sector risks losing valuable staff.
Measuring tools should go hand in hand with measuring the experience of using them.
Searching for information is one of the clearest examples of hidden friction. Half (50%) of healthcare workers spend at least two hours every week looking for information across workplace systems, and 15% spend more than five hours doing it.
Searching may not feel like ‘lost productivity’ in the same way as a cancelled appointment or an empty shift. But it is still precious time that healthcare workers could be spending with patients.
This challenge has caused healthcare workers to find their own, longer fixes. Over half (58%) of healthcare workers say they often or sometimes duplicate work because information is difficult to find. Almost half (48%) say colleagues regularly ask questions that could have been answered if information were easier to access.
While this can look like individual habits or resistance to change, they are really employees adapting intelligently to systems that do not fit the way that work actually happens.
Start with the work, not the technology
If we want to reduce digital friction, we need to look at technology from the employee’s perspective.
Take a common task and ask how many systems someone has to open, how often they have to switch, where they have to re-enter information, and when they ask a colleague for help.
This exercise can reveal more than an adoption report ever will. The starting point should be about getting a comprehensive understanding of how employees work and what they need from their technology to create efficiencies and streamline processes.
To get a full picture of the impact that digital friction is having, the first step is to make the problem visible. Healthcare organisations already know how to measure performance in incredible detail. Some of that discipline should be applied to the digital environments in which staff work every day.
That means measuring more than logins and adoption, and most importantly, listening to the people doing the work. Reducing digital friction requires leaders to recognise that technology should reduce the effort required to do good work, not create another layer of admin around it.
In healthcare, every hour recovered from unnecessary digital friction is capacity returned to give back to patients. We have spent years asking what technology can do for healthcare, but now we need to be asking how we can streamline tools so healthcare workers do less.
