For providers, the workload associated with clinical documentation remains an evergreen challenge. Despite regulatory interventions and abundant tools in the market, providers still spend roughly one-third of their work hours on clinical documentation.¹ This challenge is fueled by overdocumentation, underutilized EHR support tools, and unstandardized note templates.

For many, this clinical documentation burden cuts into time for patient visits and leads to long after-work hours just to keep up with the load. Like many organizations, providers at Sunny Peak Health System had faced this challenge for years.

Sunny Peak Health System (a pseudonym) is a nonprofit healthcare system based in the southeast. They have six major medical centers with 6,800 employees and 2,600 active physicians. With over 900 beds, they treat approximately 20,000 patients in the hospital and serve about 275,000 individuals through outpatient locations.

Sunny Peak deployed a three-step approach to reduce provider time spent writing clinical notes for patient visits and later reviewing these notes for chart review. Unlike common approaches that focus only on simplifying the writing process, Sunny Peak’s approach aims to also cut down on the excessive and unnecessary information that providers must review. Their approach includes tailoring solutions to individual providers, launching concise note templates, and off-loading manual documentation tasks to AI.

Sunny Peak’s three-step approach resulted in marked reductions in documentation time, increases in workflow efficiency, and gains in provider satisfaction. Notably, they saw a 61% decrease in provider time spent in clinical notes after work hours. They further tracked a 17% increase in same-day and two-day note closure rates. And from their AI solutions, Sunny Peak confirmed an improvement in clinical data completeness, accuracy, and quality.

Sunny Peak also realized gains in provider satisfaction. They experienced a 24% increase in provider satisfaction and a 13% decrease in provider ratings of their level of burnout.