Beyond the EHR: Rethinking Clinical Communication in Modern Healthcare

Sep 24
2025

Beyond the EHR: Rethinking Clinical Communication in Modern Healthcare

By Judit Sharon, CEO and founder, OnPage.

Electronic health record (EHR) systems now serve as the central nervous system of modern healthcare. They streamline documentation, bring care teams together and give providers sharper tools to protect patient safety and deliver consistent, coordinated care. Yet when it comes to real-time communication, many clinicians and administrators are hitting the same wall: embedded EHR messaging tools often fail to deliver reliable, accountable communication.

If you’ve ever waited hours to find out whether an urgent message got through—or had to track down the right on-call colleague because your EHR didn’t know who was available—you know exactly what’s at stake. In clinical environments, a missed or delayed message isn’t just an inconvenience; it can alter patient outcomes.

This gap between documentation and communication is widening, and healthcare leaders need to take notice. The question is not whether EHRs are valuable—they are—but whether their messaging features are sufficient for modern care. Increasingly, the answer is no.

What Are the Limitations of EHR Chat Tools?

On paper, built-in EHR chat features sound efficient. Clinicians already live inside the record system, so why not communicate there too? But integration does not equal effectiveness. Instead of providing clarity and accountability, these tools often create confusion and delay. In practice, they function more like message drop boxes than intelligent communication systems.

Three critical shortcomings appear consistently:

1. No escalation path. If a message goes unanswered, it may sit idle indefinitely. Without automated escalation, critical alerts can languish unseen, delaying time-sensitive interventions.
2. Lack of prioritization. A minor scheduling note looks identical to a stat lab result. When every message appears equally urgent, alert fatigue sets in, and critical updates risk being overlooked.
3. Unclear accountability. EHR chat rarely offers reliable read receipts or visibility into who is on shift. Clinicians are left guessing whether a message was received or acted upon, often triggering redundant outreach and wasted effort.

Together, these weaknesses illustrate why relying solely on EHR-native chat creates dangerous blind spots in care delivery. Messages may also land with staff who are off duty, in surgery or away from devices, further blurring accountability and delaying care.

The Tangible Costs of Communication Gaps

In healthcare, weak communication goes beyond being an operational nuisance and rises to the level of a clinical liability. When urgent updates are delayed or overlooked, the consequences ripple across patient care, compliance and workforce wellbeing. These challenges aren’t theoretical; they play out daily in hospitals, clinics and practices of every size. The impact shows up in four critical ways:

• Delayed treatment. Even short lapses in communication can delay diagnostic or therapeutic decisions, directly affecting patient outcomes.
• Compliance exposure. Without audit-ready logs showing delivery and acknowledgment, organizations face increased regulatory scrutiny, legal challenges and financial penalties. Documentation gaps can be just as dangerous as clinical ones.
• Clinician burnout. A nonstop stream of notifications—many of them non-urgent—creates emotional exhaustion and disengagement. When every ping feels the same, providers struggle to focus on patient care.
• Many teams rely on a patchwork of EHR messaging, texts, personal apps and phone calls. This fragmented ecosystem forces clinicians to chase information instead of delivering care.

The evidence is clear: weak communication slows processes, undermines efficiency, increases liability and compromises patient safety.

What Should Practices Demand from Communication Platforms?

Acknowledging the limits of EHR chat is only the first step. The next step is defining what strong communication should look like. Abandoning EHRs isn’t the answer—they remain essential for documentation and data-driven care. But expecting them to double as robust communication platforms is unrealistic. The smarter approach is to augment EHRs with purpose-built communication tools designed for clinical urgency, accountability and sustainability.

Key features to prioritize include:

• Automated escalation. No message should remain unanswered. Escalation workflows reroute alerts to backup providers, ensuring patient coverage isn’t compromised.
• Role- and shift-based routing. Messages must reach the right provider, at the right time, without guesswork. Intelligent routing tied to schedules and specialties reduces errors and delays.
• Unified communication hub. Text, voice and alerts should flow through one secure platform, reducing fragmentation and providing a single source of truth.
  Smart prioritization. Tiered alerts or AI-driven filters can separate urgent clinical updates from routine messages, protecting clinicians from notification fatigue.
• Boundary controls. Systems must support off-hour protection, silencing non-urgent pings while ensuring true emergencies break through.
• Audit-ready tracking. Every message should carry a transparent trail—delivered, read, acknowledged, acted upon—helping meet compliance requirements and supporting legal defensibility.
• Seamless integration. Platforms should plug into existing EHRs, calendars and on-call schedules, reducing complexity rather than adding to it.

When practices implement these capabilities, the result is more than streamlined workflows. It becomes a safety net that supports both clinicians and patients.

Communication as a Clinical Imperative

Clear and reliable communication is just as vital to patient care as maintaining accurate records or delivering timely diagnostics. Every message that fails to reach its destination introduces risk into the system. Every delay adds unnecessary stress to already overburdened providers.

Healthcare leaders must treat communication as a strategic investment. Just as EHRs transformed documentation, intelligent communication platforms can transform collaboration and care delivery.

Imagine a future where:

• Urgent results automatically route to the right provider and are acknowledged.
• Teams no longer juggle six different apps just to keep track of updates.
• Clinicians leave shifts confident that non-urgent issues won’t intrude on their off hours.
• Patients benefit from faster, safer interventions because the right signals reach the right person, on time.

The change represents both an efficiency upgrade and a cultural shift toward sustainable, accountable, patient-centered care.

A Call to Action

Physicians, nurses, administrators and system leaders each have a role to play. For providers, the need is immediate. Your ability to deliver care depends on communication you can trust. For administrators and executives, the mandate is equally urgent. Your compliance posture, risk exposure, and workforce sustainability hinge on closing this gap.

The bottom line is clear: EHRs are indispensable, but they are not enough. Thriving in modern healthcare requires communication platforms purpose-built for the urgency, accountability and precision of clinical practice.

Better communication supports better care, safeguards providers, strengthens organizations and builds a more resilient healthcare system. By investing in smarter communication, healthcare leaders can create an environment where clinicians thrive, patients receive timely interventions and the entire care continuum moves with greater confidence and clarity.