EHRs Inflict Enormous Pain on Doctors. It’ll Take More Than Stopwatches to Learn Why

Electronic health records slow doctors down and distract them from meaningful face time caring for patients. That is the sad but unsurprising finding of a time and motion study published in Tuesday’s Annals of Internal Medicine. A team of researchers determined that physicians are spending almost half of their time in the office on electronic health records (EHRs) and desk work and just 27 percent on face time with patients — which is what the vast majority of doctors went into medicine to do. Once they get home, they average another one to two hours completing EHRs.

Jonathan BushI wish I could say I was shocked by these results. But they just add a fresh headline to old news, reinforcing what we already know too well: the more our country spends on traditional EHR software, the more time providers must spend on them, the more dissatisfied they become, the more frustrated patients feel, and the more expensive health care gets.

This is a shared problem with more than enough culpability to go around. Vendors like my company, athenahealth, and others have been required to develop EHRs that satisfy government regulations rather than the needs of providers and patients. With limited authority and the best of intentions to oversee EHR certification and adoption, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology continues to inflict enormous pain on our nation’s providers and care teams, turning caregivers into box-checkers and inadvertently limiting the private sector from innovating...