Doctors say electronic records waste time

Doctors complain that they waste an average of 48 minutes a day, or four hours a week, when they record their patients' health information into digital records, a new study shows. The results were collected in a small survey, whose findings were put into a letter that was published Monday in the online edition of JAMA Internal Medicine. A draft of the letter was released Monday to a group of health care reporters at the National Library of Medicine. Dr. Clement McDonald, lead author of the study and director of the NLM Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, presented the letter, "The Use of Internist's Free Time by Ambulatory Care Electronic Medical Record Systems."