In health IT circles, from the federal government level down to the physician practice level, the conversation about reducing the ever-increasing clinician burden has ramped up in the past several months to the point that it's become one of the most highly-discussed industry issues. While doctors complaining about electronic health records (EHRs) is nothing new, and has been covered ad nauseam in both the trade press and the mainstream media, their levels of frustration have gained significant momentum of late.
Those who attest that EHRs create more work for physicians, rather than less, frequently point to a study published in the fall of 2016 in the Annals of Internal Medicine that got a massive amount of attention amongst health IT folks. Researchers for this study concluded that for every hour physicians provide direct clinical face time to patients, nearly two additional hours is spent on EHR and desk work within the clinic day. And, outside office hours, physicians spend another one to two hours of personal time each night doing additional computer and other clerical work. In an accompanying editorial published in the journal, Susan Hingle, M.D., from SIU (Southern Illinois University) School of Medicine, wrote, "[Christine] Sinsky and colleagues confirm what many practicing physicians have claimed: Electronic health records, in their current state, occupy a lot of physicians' time and draw attention away from their direct interactions with patients and from their personal lives."
What's more, Hingle also noted in her editorial that half of the practices studied had documentation support services (dictation or a documentation assistant) available to physicians. To this end, findings from another recent study revealed that dictation and natural language processing (NLP)--a technology that allows providers to gather and analyze unstructured data, such as free-text notes--may be helpful in reducing these burdens.
Source: Healthcare Informatics (View full article)
Posted by Dan Corcoran on November 9, 2017 07:06 AM
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