Medical Documentation Burden Among US Office-Based Physicians in 2019: A National Study
Open accessAbstract
This cross-sectional study uses data from the 2019 National Electronic Health Records Survey to assess the burden and time spent on medical documentation outside office hours among US physicians.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Across ambulatory specialties, physicians report a daily average of nearly 2 hours of documentation time outside of normal work hours, with around 10% reporting over 4 hours per day.
“Across ambulatory specialties, physicians report a daily average of nearly 2 hours of documentation time outside of normal work hours, with around 10% reporting over 4 hours per day.2”
From Evaluating the Quality and Safety of Ambient Digital Scribe Platforms Using Simulated Ambulatory Encounters (2025) · cites this paper as [2]
The results passage indexed under Methods (page not supplied) reports a mean of 1.77 hours per day documenting outside office hours among US office-based physicians, supporting 'nearly 2 hours.' The Methods passage includes a response category of more than 4 hours, but our copy does not give the percentage of physicians in that category; the 'around 10%' figure is therefore unsupported. (LLM, conf=0.85)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredHCPs spend on average two hours outside the official working day on documentation tasks.
“evidence suggests that HCPs spend on average two hours outside the official working day on documentation tasks [8].”
From Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Powered Documentation Systems in Healthcare: A Systematic Review (2025) · cites this paper as [8]
The results passage and Table 2 report a mean of 1.77 hours per day documenting outside office hours, reasonably rounded to two hours. The study concerns US office-based physicians, however, not HCPs generally, so the claim extends beyond the population studied. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredMedical sub-specialties also experience documentation burden.
“medical sub-specialties also experience documentation burden, [28]”
From Effect of an Electronic Health Record-Based Intervention on Documentation Practices (2024) · cites this paper as [28]
Documentation burden remains a considerable challenge among medical providers and is a key area of focus in the effort to decrease clinician burnout.
“Documentation burden remains a considerable challenge among medical providers and is a key area of focus in the effort to decrease clinician burnout.”
From Evaluating the Quality and Safety of Ambient Digital Scribe Platforms Using Simulated Ambulatory Encounters (2025) · cites this paper as [2]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 5 · Cited by 118
- Authors
- Gaffney, A., Woolhandler, S., Cai, C., Bor, D., Himmelstein, J., McCormick, D., & Himmelstein, D. U.
- Affiliations
- Cambridge Health Alliance (US)
- Brigham and Women's Hospital (US)
- Corresponding author
- Gaffney, Adam
- Venue
- JAMA Internal Medicine
- Publisher
- American Medical Association (AMA)
- Published
- 2022-05-01
- Volume
- 182
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 564
- ISSN
- 2168-6106 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8961402
- OpenAlex
- W4220962859
- Semantic Scholar
- 45693e8b73048bdadd73e248de49e6ea68ec64d5
- Cited by
- 118
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 27 · 2025: 39 · 2024: 40 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 1
- FWCI
- 17.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- JAMA Internal Medicine (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Electronic Health Records Systems
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Medical Coding and Health Information
- Health Sciences › Nursing › Research and Theory › Nursing Diagnosis and Documentation
- Keywords
- office-based physicians, electronic health records, physician workload
- MeSH terms
- Documentation, Humans, Office Visits, Physicians, Physicians' Offices, United States
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
