Physician Burnout Due to EHR Is a Major Concern in Healthcare

Physician Burnout Due to EHR Is a Major Concern in Healthcare Integration of medical transcription service and EHR helps physicians prevent burnout and spend more quality time with their patients.

Electronic health records were introduced to help physicians improve their practice.

However, it turned out to be a distressing experience with never-ending medical documentation needs. With the EHR system, physicians are forced to spend their quality time on the computer capturing patient’s medical information rather than focusing on patients.

Physicians also tend to miss out opportunities to engage with patients when using the EHR. Many studies have shown that physicians spend one-third of their time in the exam room looking at computer screens. This affects patient care and the quality of medical service provided. The successful adoption of Electronic Health Record could be achieved by utilizing EHR-integrated medical transcription service.

According to a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, variations in the use of electronic health records (EHRs) within medical specialties suggest an opportunity to optimize care delivery systems and processes. The time spent on EHR instead of on providing optimum patient care is a concern for the healthcare industry.

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J Marc Overhage, MD, PhD, Cerner Corporation (Kansas City, MO), and colleagues designed an analysis to find out how much time ambulatory medical subspecialties and primary care physicians across US care delivery systems spent on various EHR functions.

155,000 US physicians from nonsurgical, ambulatory practices using the Cerner Millennium EHR participated in this study. Data were extracted during 2018 that totalled the time spent on each of the clinically-focused EHR functions like documentation, message center, orders, chart review, alerts, patient discovery, allergies, problems and diagnoses, medicine reconciliation, departure, histories, health maintenance and others.

The study took into account 100 million patient encounters across 417 health systems. The result of the study showed that physicians spent an average of 16 minutes and 14 seconds per encounter using EHRs. The functions that took up maximum time are chart reviews (33 percent), documentation (24 percent), and ordering (17 percent).

Dr Overhage and colleagues also found that distribution of time spent by physicians using EHRs varied significantly within specialties. The proportion of time spent on various clinically focused functions was similar across specialties. However, the researchers said the study did not answer whether the time non-surgical physicians providing care to adults spent on using EHRs in the ambulatory setting is an appropriate amount of time.

Doctors’ Time is a Priority Doctors provide treatment to patients but with EHR it is difficult to make sufficient time for patients. As per recent studies, there will be a shortage of doctors in the USA in the future.

This shows that doctors can expect their office to be bombarded with dozens of new patients.

This also leads us to believe that there will be an increase in electronic health record (EHR) documentation. Documentation assistance becomes crucial in this context. Physicians must be equipped with the right tools to ensure streamlined processes. If physicians have a single actionable longitudinal patient record at the point of care, they feel secure and there are no gaps in their views of a patient such as medication management or unknown risk factors.

Today, many healthcare organizations hire medical transcription companies or scribes to assist them with the complex documentation requirements. EHR-integrated transcription is a great option to consider to improve efficiency as well as save the time they would otherwise spend on their EHR to input patient information.

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918-221-7809