Unsurprisingly, a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association found the majority of surveyed physicians reported experiencing stress due to health information technology.
The study polled 4,197 practicing physicians in Rhode Island in 2017, and 1,792 doctors responded.
Ninety-one percent of respondents were EHR users. Of those individuals, 70 percent reported feeling health IT-related stress, which was defined as having at least one of the following: poor/marginal time for documentation, moderately high/excessive time spent on the EHR at home and agreement that using an EHR adds to daily frustration. The highest prevalence of HIT-related stress was among doctors in primary care specialties.
Additionally, 26 percent of the 1,792 respondents reported feelings of burnout.
Another interesting tidbit from the study was that physicians citing poor/marginal time for documentation had 2.8 times the odds of burnout versus those reporting sufficient time. Doctors reporting moderately high/excessive time spent on the EHR at home had 1.9 times the odds of burnout compared to those with minimal/no EMR use at home. Physicians who agreed that EHRs add to their daily frustration experienced 2.4 times the odds of burnout compared to those who disagreed.
“Identifying HIT-specific factors associated with burnout may guide healthcare organizations seeking to measure and remediate burnout among their physicians and staff,” the study concludes.
Overall, the JAMIA survey adds to a growing body of work detailing how time-consuming and exasperating EHRs can be.
A 2017 study out of the University of Wisconsin and the American Medical Association looked at how much of a doctor’s day is spent on EHR-related tasks. From 2013 to 2016, researchers analyzed 142 physicians, all of whom used an Epic EHR, at a system in southern Wisconsin. All data was captured via EHR event log data during clinic hours (8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday) and non-clinic hours. On average, the primary care physicians spent 5.9 hours out of their 11.4-hour workday in the EHR. Four and a half of those hours were during clinic hours and 1.4 hours were after clinic hours.
A separate survey from Medscape examined the factors contributing to physician burnout. Of the 15,000 physicians from 29 specialties who took part, 42 percent said they were burned out. When asked what contributed to their burnout, 24 percent cited the increasing computerization of healthcare (that is, EHRs).
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