Healthcare providers spend hours recording notes, contributing to burnout and less time spent with patients. Burnout affects a physician's ability to work. It makes them less compassionate and more likely to make mistakes. Physician burnout affects patients, too. Stressed doctors are less compassionate and more likely to make mistakes. Clinicians who leave the field or cut back hours reduce patient access to care, and replacing doctors in the midst of a physician shortage drives up costs. Source: Shannon Alexander/University of Florida

Electronic health records (EHR) enable better, faster and more accurate communication among healthcare providers. But filling them out takes a lot of time and effort, which leads to doctors spending more time taking notes and less time interacting with patients because it can take hours to type notes. The pandemic stretched healthcare workers even thinner. The response was to increase wellness initiatives with a specific focus on self-care, but self-care doesn’t fix heavy workloads.

Researchers from the University of Florida evaluated 35 studies on records-related burnout and searched for common threads. They found that streamlining records should be the goal to relieve burnout.

The team created four potential solutions that hospitals and insurance companies should focus on when evaluating how to lighten the load.

The first solution is share the load. Overflowing inboxes leads to burnout. A shared email inbox allows office staff to sort through emails and take care of messages that do not require a doctor's response. The next solution is to revisit policy. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services created a Patients Over Paperwork initiative intended to reduce documentation requirements and reduce the overall record burden. If this initiative works, it could be used as a model for private insurers.

The next solution is to create power users. Doctors may not know about time-saving features in EHR interfaces, like templates or bookmarks. The optimization team offers proactive support and streamlines the amount of time a doctor has to spend in the system. The final solution was to collaborate on design, which would gather input from users to help design EHRs and selecting and implementing them.

This study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.