Time spent on dedicated patient care and documentation tasks before and after the introduction of a structured and standardized electronic health record

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Physicians spend around 35% of their time documenting patient data. They are concerned that adopting a structured and standardized electronic health record (EHR) will lead to more time documenting and less time for patient care, especially during consultations. OBJECTIVE: This study measures the effect of the introduction of a structured and standardized EHR on documentation time and time for dedicated patient care during outpatient consultations. METHODS: We measured physicians' time spent on four task categories during outpatient consultations: documentation, patient care, peer communication, and other activities. Physicians covered various specialties from two university hospitals that jointly implemented a structured and standardized EHR. Preimplementation, one hospital used a legacy-EHR, and one primarily paper-based records. The same physicians were observed 2 to 6 months before and 6 to 8 months after implementation.We analyzed consultation duration, and percentage of time spent on each task category. Differences in time distribution before and after implementation were tested using multilevel linear regression. RESULTS: We observed 24 physicians (162 hours, 439 consultations). We found no significant difference in consultation duration or number of consultations per hour. In the legacy-EHR center, we found the implementation associated with a significant decrease in time spent on dedicated patient care (-8.5%). In contrast, in the previously paper-based center, we found a significant increase in dedicated time spent on documentation (8.3%) and decrease in time on combined patient care and documentation (-4.6%). The effect on dedicated documentation time significantly differed between centers. CONCLUSION: Implementation of a structured and standardized EHR was associated with 8.5% decrease in time for dedicated patient care during consultations in one center and 8.3% increase in dedicated documentation time in another center. These results are in line with physicians' concerns that the introduction of a structured and standardized EHR might lead to more documentation burden and less time for dedicated patient care.