Ctrl+Alt+Heal: Rebooting Physician Wellness in the Age of Electronic Health Records (Wellness Committee- and Informatics, Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence Interest Group-Sponsored)
The Electronic Health Record (EHR) has significantly impacted emergency medicine, improving documentation and access to patient data, but also contributing to physician burnout. Time pressures, cognitive load, and difficulty maintaining patient rapport are key challenges. Despite usability improvements and Evaluation and Management coding changes, many physicians still struggle to optimize EHR interactions. This session will explore practical solutions, including efficient documentation techniques, ambient scribing, and voice recognition. We will also examine the potential of artificial intelligence technologies—such as natural language processing and automated documentation— to reduce the documentation burden, improve patient care, and enhance physician wellness.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify key factors contributing to EHR-related stress and inefficiencies in emergency department workflows.
- Examine the multifaceted solutions to optimize EHR to improve physician wellness and burnout in emergency medicine.
- Appraise emerging technologies, including AI, to design best practices for optimizing EHR interactions to limit their impact on, or improve, physician well-being.
Presenters:
- Brad D. Gordon, MD, MS
- Jessie G. Nelson, MD (she/her/hers)
- Christian Rose, MD
- Al'ai Alvarez, MD (he/him/his)
- Maia Winkel, MD
- Mia L. Karamatsu, MD
- Allie R. Gubbels, MD
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Brad D. Gordon, MD, MS
Regions Hospital
Dr. Gordon brings 25 years of experience in emergency medicine and clinical informatics, with a focus on optimizing ordering and documentation efficiency, as well as developing simple, cost-effective decision support tools. Through innovative applications of readily available technology, Dr. Gordon has transformed emergency practice, improving care quality and enhancing the wellness of physicians and physician assistants, all while delivering sustainable value to healthcare organizations.
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Jessie G. Nelson, MD
Regions Hospital/HealthPartners/University of Minnesota
Dr. Jessie Nelson is a senior staff physician with the Emergency Medicine Department at Regions Hospital. She currently serves as Director of Emergency Medicine Education Research at Regions and is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Nelson is fellowship-trained in medical education and simulation and focuses much of her effort on the growth and development of trainees. She serves as an Assessment and Coaching Expert at the University of Minnesota Medical School. She is active in the training of medical students and residents in the Emergency Department and directs procedural simulation efforts for the residency. Her passions are practical educational methodology and personal productivity in academia, and she's always looking for new ways to help learners learn and teachers teach. -
Christian Rose, MD
Assistant Professor Department of Emergency Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine
Dr. Christian Rose is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University. As a dual-boarded emergency physician and clinical informaticist, he operates at the intersection of clinical medicine, informatics, and innovation. He began to study the effect of technology on medicine during his undergraduate years, obtaining his degree in Physics as well as Science, Technology, and Society. He continued this pursuit in medical school at Columbia University and residency at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he engaged in various human-centered informatics projects like gene discovery, decision support, and alert fatigue. He completed his informatics fellowship training at Stanford University, where he began his research in deep learning and AI. Dr. Rose strives to improve both patient and physician experiences in medicine, focusing on how information technologies can enhance clinical practice and patient outcomes without losing sight of the essential human aspects of healthcare.
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Al'ai Alvarez, MD
SAEM Nominating Committee Member
Stanford Emergency Medicine
My long-term interest is to study the intersection of Medical Education, Process Improvement (Quality and Clinical Operations), Representation (Diversity), and Well-being (Inclusion/Belonging) through human-centered design. My academic and professional experience has provided me with an excellent background in understanding the drivers for professional fulfillment in medicine and its interplay on efficiencies of care, the culture of wellness, and personal resilience, as highlighted by Stanford WellMD’s Professional Fulfillment Model. Specifically, my work investigates the role of self-compassion and resilience in promoting belongingness and overcoming isolation and loneliness in medicine exacerbated by experiences of medical harm, vicarious trauma, implicit bias, microaggressions, and imposter phenomenon.
I graduated from the faculty fellowship at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign, where I explored the role of mindfulness in resuscitations. Furthermore, I co-directed and organized the inaugural High-Performance Resuscitation Teams Summit in May 2022 in Chicago, IL, in collaboration with Mayo Clinic and the Mission Critical Teams Institute, to understand commonalities among high-performing teams in healthcare, aerospace, sports, military, special operations, and fire rescue.
As an attending EM physician, I served as the Assistant Medical Director on Quality Education and Clinical Operations at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center Emergency Department (ED), the busiest ED in Northern California. This role offered me direct insight into drivers of burnout through inefficiencies in clinical practice and the need for a culture of wellness, especially in quality improvement and peer review. As an Associate Residency Program Director at the Stanford Emergency Medicine Residency Program (2015-2021), I led initiatives to enhance personal resilience while advocating for improving the clinical and learning environment to improve well-being and professional fulfillment.
Currently, I am the Director of Well-Being and co-chair of the Human Potential Team at Stanford Emergency Medicine. I also serve as the Stanford EM Physician Wellness Fellowship Director. As the chair of the Stanford WellMD Physician Wellness Forum, I lead monthly discussions to understand how better to optimize clinical practice environments to improve well-being and professional work-life balance.
As Chair of the SAEM Wellness Committee (2022- ), we are spearheading the “October is #StopTheStigmaEM month,” which has been the most extensive campaign for SAEM, mobilizing national organizations in EM and leveraging social media to increase awareness and support efforts to humanize physicians, prioritize mental health, and normalize receiving mental health support.
Given my disparate physician leadership and clinical experience, I offer a unique and valuable perspective in serving on the Nominations Committee. I aim to continue fostering collaboration, empowerment, and self-compassion in academic emergency medicine's learning and work environment. This includes finding ways to recognize the work of academic EM physicians and EM bound trainees. -
Maia Winkel, MD
Stanford University
Maia Winkel, MD is the current Stanford Emergency Medicine Physician Wellness Fellow, as well as a Clinical Instructor at the Stanford School of Medicine. Prior to this, she completed Emergency Medicine residency at the Jacobi and Montefiore Medical Centers in the Bronx, NY, where she was Chief Resident. She holds a Masters in Bioethics from Columbia University.
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Mia L. Karamatsu, MD
Director, Well-Being Pediatric Emergency Medicine
Stanford University
Mia Karamatsu, MD, is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She serves as the Director of Well-Being for the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Stanford.
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Allie R. Gubbels, MD
Stanford Health Care
Dr. Gubbels is a 4th year resident with a passion for wellness and digital health initiatives.