Primary Care Docs Spending About Half Their Work Days Interacting with EHRs

I have posted a number of previous notes about the inefficiencies introduced by EHRs, particularly particularly relating to the fact that their use now constitutes a major time sink for physicians (see:Some of the Major Criticisms of EHRs; Why Few Changes Anticipated;Problems Associated with EHRs: A Medical Malpractice Perspective). A recent article quoted a research study about the time logged by primary care physicians on their EHRs (see:Family doctors spend 86 minutes of “pajama time” with EHRs nightly). Below is an excerpt from it:A new study using electronic health record (EHR) system event-logging data to track family physicians ’ workdays finds that primary care physicians spend more than half of their work day interacting with the EHR—with nearly a quarter of that computer work happening after clinic hours. Yet, physician experts argue, a big chunk of the administrative work family physicians and other doctors do on EHRs could be properly delegated to other members of the practice team....Over a three-year period, all Epic...EHR interactions from 142 family physicians in a single health care system in southern Wisconsin were captured from “event logging” records, used to monitor performance of the system.The tale of all that tape is that each weekday, physicians spent an average of 5.9 hours out of an 11.4-hour workday working in the EHR. That consisted of 4.5 hours during clinic times and 1.4 hours after work. Clerical and administrative tasks such as doc...

Source: Lab Soft News - October 13, 2017 Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Bruce Friedman Tags: Cost of Healthcare Electronic Health Record (EHR) Healthcare Business Healthcare Delivery Healthcare Information Technology Hospital Executive Management Hospital Financial Quality of Care Source Type: blogs