Improving EHR Systems with User Experience and Interface Design to Reduce Clinician Burnout and Enhance Workflow Efficiency

A recent study found that primary care physicians (PCPs) spend 28.9 to 45.7 minutes on EHR per visit — trying to find the time to do this for every patient in addition to all of their other tasks is very difficult. This time-consuming task requires your organization to either cut back on the number of patients a PCP can see in a day or force your staff to find pockets of time during the day to get this work done. Scaling back on patients can help to take the burden off of your staff but you sacrifice some of your efficiency. And leaving it up to the PCPs to find the time in their schedule may leave your efficiency intact but will burden your staff instead, leading to them burning out and quitting. Finding a solution that improves EHR systems to increase efficiency and reduce clinician burnout should be a high priority for your organization.

One solution to this problem lies in the EHR systems’ user experience and interface design. Tailoring the interface to fit what clinicians need and want can reduce the time spent on EHR, thus increasing efficiency and reducing burnout. For a better understanding of how exactly EHR systems need to be tailored, we reached out to our incredible Healthcare IT Today Community and asked them — how can user experience and interface design be improved in EHR systems to reduce clinician burnout and enhance workflow efficiency? The following are their answers.

Stephanie Murray, Senior Director, Epic Services at CereCore
No group of users will ever agree 100% on what a screen should look like. So, an in-depth understanding of a user’s workflow is critical to designing a screen aligned with their experience. Nothing can replace observing a clinical workflow in action, because it helps a designer see what their users are trying to do. This real-life observation should trigger ideas that gain efficiencies instead of inhibiting the workflow. Finding the balance between a plethora of options on a screen and a simplistic configuration—either of which can cause confusion and uncertainty—allows each user to accomplish their workflows with ease and efficiency.

Shelley Wehmeyer, Senior Director of Product and Partner Marketing at Rhapsody
Optimizing user experience in EHRs is essential to maintaining clinician productivity and, by extension, patient satisfaction and health outcomes. First, a well-designed interface can streamline workflows by removing redundant steps and enabling intuitive data sharing within the clinician’s existing process—eliminating unnecessary clicks. When EHR systems integrate seamlessly with established workflows, clinicians spend less time navigating complex workflows and more time with patients. This results in a more efficient and engaged healthcare workforce, benefiting both clinicians and patients.

Second, a robust integration platform allows provider IT teams to quickly deploy digital health applications by giving them the tools they need to deeply integrate disparate systems. For example, getting new ambient AI technology deployed and integrated with the EHR or equipping clinician-researchers with the latest clinical trial data from the EHR. By quickly delivering these new tools in a way that aligns with clinicians’ processes rather than complicating them, it reduces burnout and improves efficiency.

Vijay Adapala, EVP Global Supply Partnerships at Doceree
A simplified interface can significantly decrease clutter and alleviate cognitive load. Customizing the view of an individual’s workflow, along with the use of voice recognition templates, greatly aids in minimizing documentation time. The ability to access information efficiently can substantially lessen physician burnout. Additionally, regularly gathering user feedback is essential for ongoing redesign efforts to enhance user-friendliness.

Kelley Harar, Vice President, Federal Health at Maximus
Improving experience in EHR systems can be achieved by creating intuitive and customizable interfaces that align with clinicians’ natural workflows, reducing unnecessary clicks and cognitive load. Implementing advanced features like predictive text, AI-driven decision support, and voice recognition can streamline documentation and enhance efficiency. Additionally, prioritizing mobile accessibility and interoperability ensures that clinicians can access and update patient records seamlessly across devices and platforms. Collecting continuous user feedback and rapidly iterating design changes based on this input can also ensure the system evolves to meet the real-world needs of healthcare providers effectively.

Interoperability among EHR systems could allow AI quality reviews across various specialties, rather than having clinical case reviews technology could pull the wholistic record and review it using AI.

As part of establishing improved experience for clinicians, health systems can rethink their workflows and harmonize standards of clinical practice across care settings and data representation this ‘ownership model’ can commingle patient-generated data. Interoperability is enabled through standard data and information representation. It reduces administrative costs and clinical costs to drive costs down and create a new model of innovative health data delivery for better outcomes.

Craig Joseph, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Nordic Global Consulting
Improving user experience and interface design in electronic health record (EHR) systems reduces clinician burnout and enhances workflow efficiency. A foundational principle is to design interfaces that make it “easy to do the right thing” by streamlining and automating common, repetitive tasks. For instance, defaults based on patient context and known best practices can reduce the cognitive load of decision-making and minimize manual data entry. Additionally, incorporating clinical decision support (CDS) that is contextually relevant—and not intrusive—helps guide clinicians without interrupting their flow, allowing them to stay focused on patient care rather than navigating endless pop-up alerts.

“Getting rid of stupid stuff” is another essential step. This means auditing and eliminating redundant or outdated steps within EHR workflows that add no real value. Each click, dropdown menu, and unnecessary field should be questioned. This type of “EHR decluttering” requires a sharp focus on usability testing and clinician feedback to identify and remove friction points. Furthermore, transparency and predictability in the user interface minimize frustration. For example, showing a clear pathway for how information is used, where it goes, and why it’s necessary helps clinicians understand the EHR’s purpose beyond documentation. Ensuring that actions produce consistent results also enhances trust in the system, which is crucial for adoption.

Finally, adopting a continuous improvement mindset is essential for a human-centered EHR design. Unlike static software products, EHRs must evolve with ongoing user feedback, clinical needs, and regulatory changes. Establishing regular feedback loops, such as clinician focus groups or in-system feedback buttons, allows for iterative improvements that keep the system relevant and user-friendly. Through minor, incremental changes, the EHR can adapt to new workflows, incorporate lessons from usability data, and address emerging pain points—creating a dynamic environment that supports clinicians rather than hinders them. In short, we have to make healthcare work for humans – both the ones using the systems and the patients on the receiving end of services.

Dr. William Morris, Chief Medical Officer at Ambience Healthcare
One of the best examples of novel user experience is that of ambient voice as an input. We need platforms that free up time to focus on the most critical portion of a patient-clinician encounter, and at the same time capture and document an accurate and complete record. Timely, accurate, and patient-centric is a win for all.

Rob Helton, SVP of Product at WebPT
The best user experience is native to the clinician’s workflow. To achieve this, we need specialized interfaces tailored for each member of the care team. Specialty and niche EMRs can address this need effectively, whereas general EHRs often provide only generalized views. To completely care for a patient, we must embrace specialized EMRs and seamless interoperability as the solution for complete patient care—not generalized EHRs with complicated ‘one size fits all’ workflows and designs.

Andy Flanagan, CEO at Iris Telehealth
The best EHR interface is one that gets out of the way and lets clinicians do what they do best: care for patients. That means creating intuitive workflows that mirror how clinicians actually work, rather than forcing them to adapt to rigid systems. By streamlining workflows, we can help combat burnout, which affects 45% of clinicians. The only way an EHR interface will be successful is by building these systems with clinicians, not just for them. Real-world usage and feedback should guide every design decision.

Kevin Coloton, EVP & General Manager, Clinical Intelligence at Reveleer
Foundational to provider experience is how technology integrates within their clinical workflows. While EHRs are amazing resources for housing patient data, there is still work to be done to streamline operational efficiency at the point of care. Particularly, there needs to be a sharper focus on refining and reducing clinical data as opposed to massive “data lakes” of information. Sifting through mountains of EHR data leads to burnout for all members of a clinical care team. Data needs to be organized and prioritized to make it valuable in a clinical setting.

Advanced clinical technology presents new opportunities to examine and filter patient information down to the minimum amount of high-value data needed to assist a provider during clinical encounters. These curated sets of data become actionable clinical insight opportunities for providers to quickly review ahead of patient visits, or at the point of care, to ensure they are not missing any high-priority clinical conditions or care gaps. Therefore, to help providers minimize burnout and increase time spent with patients, versus sifting through mountains of data, we should integrate a data simplification strategy and leverage technology solutions to curate data, streamline workflows, and enable providers to practice at the top of their license.

David Metcalfe, Chief Technology Officer at Nextech
It is important that EHRs address and support the various nuances of different specialties and enable efficient workflows to improve overall user experience. Ambient Clinical Voice is a tool with the potential to ease and improve documentation efficiency and quality. When used correctly, this technology improves patient and provider satisfaction by allowing for more meaningful clinical interactions. However, it’s important with any new technology to keep providers central to the vetting and implementation process. Healthcare technology teams must be aware of AI shortcomings and continually adapt and solve for hurdles.

As we continue to explore opportunities for AI to reduce physician and back-office burdens, we must keep the end user in mind with every adjustment made. We need to understand how physicians practice their specialty, so we can optimize their workflows, eliminate clicks, and improve data accessibility and efficiency.

Simplifying the workflow is essential; interfaces must be easy to use and free of information overload. We also must be open to user feedback and continuous improvement because no one knows pain points better than end users. Ultimately, our job is to create simple user experiences that meet providers exactly where they are and support high-quality patient care.

Leslie Breer, Unit Lead, Clinical Care at TruBridge
We can achieve simple use through direct provider input, systems designed around end-user pain points, and continual feedback loops. Consistency between solutions is also important to improve user experience, reduce burnout, and enhance efficiency. New technology tools are intended to lift the burden and lighten workflows but they must also be properly vetted, regularly updated, and intentionally integrated.

What great insights! Huge thank you to Vijay Adapala, EVP Global Supply Partnerships at Doceree, Kelley Harar, Vice President, Federal Health at Maximus, Stephanie Murray, Senior Director, Epic Services at CereCore, Shelley Wehmeyer, Senior Director of Product and Partner Marketing at Rhapsody, Craig Joseph, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Nordic Global Consulting, Dr. William Morris, Chief Medical Officer at Ambience Healthcare, Rob Helton, SVP of Product at WebPT, Andy Flanagan, CEO at Iris Telehealth, Kevin Coloton, EVP & General Manager, Clinical Intelligence at Reveleer, David Metcalfe, Chief Technology Officer at Nextech, and Leslie Breer, Unit Lead, Clinical Care at TruBridge for taking the time out of your day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.

How do you think user experience and interface design can be improved in EHR systems to reduce clinician burnout and enhance workflow efficiency? Let us know either in the comments down below or over on social media. We’d love to hear from all of you!