Rise in Virtual Visits Linked to More Afterhours EHR Work

As virtual visits for health care expanded rapidly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the amount of time physicians spent using electronic health records (EHRs) outside of clinic hours also crept up. Thefindings, which were published yesterday inJAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that physicians offering telemedicine visits may need more time to complete EHR documentation.“[A]lthough telemedicine may offer a convenient option for patients, it exhibits a dramatic dose-response association with EHR time that exacerbates EHR burden for physicians,” A. Jay Holmgren, Ph.D., M.H.I., of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues wrote. Previous studies have shown that physicians who spend more time working on EHRs outside of work are more likely to report burnout, the authors noted.Holmgren and colleagues analyzed EHR data from physicians providing outpatient care at UCSF Health one year before the COVID-19 pandemic (August 2018-September 2019) and after the onset of the pandemic (August 2020-September 2021). The study sample included 1,052 physicians observed over 115 weeks.From before the COVID-19 pandemic to after its onset, telemedicine use increased from 3.1% to 49.3%, the authors reported. The amount of time that physicians spent working in EHRs during scheduled hours increased from 4.53 hours to 5.46 hours (per eight hours of patient care) during this time. Other key findings from the report include the following:Time spent working in EHRs outside of...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: afterhours work COVID-19 EHR electronic health records JAMA Internal Medicine pandemic telemedicine virtual visits Source Type: research