Electronic Health Record Logs Indicate That Physicians Split Time Evenly Between Seeing Patients And Desktop Medicine.

ABSTRACT: Time spent by physicians is a key resource in health care delivery. This study used data captured by the access time stamp functionality of an electronic health record (EHR) to examine physician work effort. This is a potentially powerful, yet unobtrusive, way to study physicians' use of time. We used data on physicians' time allocation patterns captured by over thirty-one million EHR transactions in the period 2011-14 recorded by 471 primary care physicians, who collectively worked on 765,129 patients' EHRs. Our results suggest that the physicians logged an average of 3.08 hours on office visits and 3.17 hours on desktop medicine each day. Desktop medicine consists of activities such as communicating with patients through a secure patient portal, responding to patients' online requests fo

SUBMITTER: Tai-Seale M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5546411 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature