|
 Electronic health records – EHR for short - are “focused on
documentation for billing as opposed to efficient and effective
documentation of clinical care,” said Dr. Ann O’Malley of
Mathematica Policy Research in Washington, D.C., who was not part of
the new study.
This makes the EHR less useful for actual patient care, which can be
frustrating for doctors, she told Reuters Health by email.
“EHR vendors need to work much more closely with practicing
physicians, nurses and staff to better understand the
functionalities they need from the record and how to make them more
clinically relevant and user friendly,” O’Malley said.
“These electronic tools also give physicians access to the medical
record when at home, which has extended the physician work day,”
said lead author Dr. Tait D. Shanafelt of the Mayo Clinic in
Rochester, Minnesota. “Studies suggest physicians spend more than 10
hrs/week interacting with the EHR after they go home from the office
on nights and weekends.”
For doctors, burnout has been linked to decreased quality of care
and medical errors, Shanafelt told Reuters Health by email.
He and his coauthors looked at survey responses collected in 2014
from U.S. doctors in all specialties. Almost 36,000 doctors were
invited to participate and 6,880 responded, including 6,560 who were
in active practice.
More than 80 percent said they used electronic health records (EHR)
and a similar proportion said they used computerized physician order
entry (CPOE), which allows them to enter medication orders or other
instructions electronically.
After accounting for other factors like practice setting and hours
worked per week, the doctors who used those tools were 33 percent
less satisfied with how much time they spent on clerical tasks, and
they had a 29 percent higher risk of burnout, compared to other
doctors, as reported in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
[to top of second column] |
“Often healthcare is compared to the airline industry,” Palen said.
“We don’t want pilots stressed out, we want them at their best
ability.”
But electronic health records and digital tools aren’t necessarily
the cause of the burnout, said Dr. Ted E. Palen of the Colorado
Permanente Medical Group in Denver, who was not part of the new
study.
“In my experience (they make) you more productive, and you’re doing
more patient care in the sense that you’re managing more patients at
one time because productivity increases,” Palen told Reuters Health
by phone.
The old paper-based workflow was disjointed and had more lag time,
he said.
“Patient access to the physician or team is much easier now,” he
said. “Email traffic initiated by patients has gone up from three to
four emails per day a decade ago to 10 to 20 emails per day.”
SOURCE: http://mayocl.in/28YCPPf Mayo Clinic Proceedings, online
June 27, 2016.
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
