Call me Dr Ishmael: trends in electronic health record notes available at emergency department visits and admissions.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Numerous studies have identified information overload as a key issue for electronic health records (EHRs). This study describes the amount of text data across all notes available to emergency physicians in the EHR, trended over the time since EHR establishment.

Materials and methods

We conducted a retrospective analysis of EHR data from a large healthcare system, examining the number of notes and a corresponding number of total words and total tokens across all notes available to physicians during patient encounters in the emergency department (ED). We assessed the change in these metrics over a 17-year period between 2006 and 2023.

Results

The study cohort included 730 968 ED visits made by 293 559 unique patients and a total note count of 132 574 964. The

SUBMITTER: Patterson BW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11110617 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature