To alleviate EHR burdens, teamwork makes the dream work

A new study shows that primary care physicians who had greater documentation support from staff spent less daily time in the electronic health record.

A study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association sought to examine the relationship between electronic health record proficiency tools and time spent interacting with the EHR.  

Researchers found that only one proficiency tool was associated with reduced time spent in the EHR.

However, they also found that primary care physicians who had greater support from their care team in writing notes spent less time in documentation-specific activities and less total time in the record per day.  

"These findings suggest that PCPs may experience reductions in EHR-related burden and documentation burden by decentralizing documentation responsibilities," wrote the research team.  

WHY IT MATTERS

Given EHRs' potential role in clinician burnout, researchers are increasingly turning their attention to factors that may increase (or decrease) time burden.   

In the JAMIA study, the researchers sought to investigate whether reduced time in the Epic EHR was associated with several proficiency tools and behaviors, including QuickActions, NoteSpeed buttons, NoteWriter macros, QuickFilters and SmartPhrases.  

Surprisingly, many of the proficiency behaviors were associated with more time in the EHR – namely, QuickActions and SmartPhrases.