Clicks and keyboards stealing face-time with patients

Almost one-half of the physician workday is now spent on electronic health record (EHR) data entry and other administrative desk work while only 27 percent is spent on direct clinical face-time with patients, a time-motion study published Monday in theAnnals of Internal Medicine found. This finding is further proof that administrative burdens are directly affecting the patient-physician relationship. Though efforts are underway to make EHRs more practical for clinical use, there are ways to relieve this burden through team-based care. Thetime-motion study, conducted by experts at the AMA and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health Care System, also found that for every hour of face-to-face time with patients, physicians spend nearly two additional hours on their EHR and other clerical desk work throughout the day. Physicians do not feel these are the tasks that should be taking up a majority of their work day —they undercut the patient-physician relationship.“I am not surprised to hear these results, and I can tell you no one who practices medicine today would be surprised by them,” said AMA Immediate-Past President Steven J. Stack, MD, to entrepreneurs at MATTER, Chicago’s health care technology incubator. “But they highlight exactly why new te chnologies that can bring greater efficiencies to medicine are so important.” The time-motion study correlates with astudy published recently in theJournal of Graduate Medical Education that tracked the average“mouse miles”—or...
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Source Type: news