Study Finds Primary Care and General Clinician EHR Use Is More Time-Consuming Than Pediatrician EHR Use

An all-Epic study spanned 349 health systems, and found pediatricians receive considerably fewer messages regarding patients, prescriptions, team activities, and results.

Pediatricians spend significantly less time actively using electronic health record (EHR) software than general medicine and family medicine clinicians, according to a study recently published in JAMA Network Open.

Some differences are due to the less medically complex health of pediatric patients, but the study authors, led by Lisa S. Rotenstein, MD, MBA, assistant medical director, population health and faculty wellbeing at Brigham and Women's Hospital, suggest that the burden of EHR documentation may be due to other factors.

The authors suggest that the burden of documenting adult patients can be lessened by making messaging more efficient, and by streamlining documentation requirements.

The study authors analyzed 349 health systems, all using Epic EHR software. The study was exempt from informed consent requirements because the data was deidentified first, the study authors stated.

Clinicians in these systems had a mean 12.9 encounters per day among general pediatrics clinicians, 11.5 encounters per day among general internal medicine clinicians, and 12.8 encounters per day among family medicine clinicians.

Mean daily total active EHR time ranged from 94.7 minutes among general pediatrics clinicians, 121.5 minutes among general internal medicine clinicians, and 127.8 minutes among family medicine clinicians.

Family medicine clinicians spent twice as long (18 minutes) on in-basket messages as did pediatric clinicians (9.4 minutes). General medicine clinicians spent similar amounts of time (18.4 minutes) as family medicine clinicians, according to the study.

Pediatric clinicians spent two-thirds as much time on clinical review and orders than their general and family medicine counterparts, the study stated. Compared with general medicine and family medicine clinicians, pediatric clinicians received one-fifth as many prescription messages, one-third as many patient messages, one-half as many team messages, and fewer than one-half as many results messages.