Did you know that for every eight hours that office-based physicians have scheduled with patients, they spend more than five hours in the EHR?
That sobering statistic, drawn from a study published in JAMIA, is just one of the revelatory findings uncovered with funding support from the AMA that have quantified the EHR burdens practicing physicians know all too well and that have contributed to the doctor burnout crisis.
To help reduce physician burnout and enhance high-quality patient care, five organizations will examine elements of EHR use to discover ways to improve workflow, teamwork and resource allocation at the practice level thanks to nearly $250,000 in grant funds from the AMA.
The AMA’s Electronic Health Record Use Research Grant Program began in 2019 to identify patterns in EHR use that may detract from patient care. The AMA has awarded more than $2.25 million in grants to 28 organizations over the years to study a variety of EHR-use topics.
“Burdensome EHR systems are a leading contributing factor in the physician burnout crisis and demand urgent action,” according to Christine Sinsky, MD, the AMA’s vice president of professional satisfaction. “The research supported by the AMA grant program builds the evidence base to help change EHR technology into an asset to medical care, and not a demoralizing burden.”
As the leader in physician well-being, the AMA is reducing physician burnout by removing administrative burdens and providing real-world solutions to help doctors rediscover the Joy in Medicine™.
The 2024 grant recipients are:
- AllianceChicago.
- Stanford University School of Medicine.
- University of Maryland.
- University of Pittsburgh.
- Yale University School of Medicine.
Among other EHR-use topics, the AMA-supported researchers at these organizations will:
- Investigate the link between problem-list attestation and the accuracy of the list in a federally qualified health center setting, as well as examine the impact on physicians and other health professionals.
- Seek to validate and improve algorithmic approaches to identify health care team structure and composition.
- Examine the impact of an inbox-redesign initiative on productivity, costs, practice efficiency and patient experience.
- Analyze rates of “teamwork for orders” in a national dataset of ambulatory care physicians and identify the effects of adopting this approach.
- Use log analysis and user-composable displays to reduce cognitive load in EHR use by physicians and other health professionals.
“The EHR Use Research Grant Program allows the AMA to work with researchers who are leading efforts to expand insight into EHR systems and measure the technologies’ capacity to support or undermine the delivery of efficient and effective clinical work,” Dr. Sinsky said.
The AMA recognizes that EHR-use data will only get more robust as vendors adopt new and better data collection and as health systems learn to maximize the potential of the data that is available. The AMA grant program is helping the field of study continue to grow.
Highlights of previously published findings from research funded by the AMA include:
- Physicians in outpatient ambulatory care receive more messages from patients through the EHR system than prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Physicians using virtual scribe services experience improvements in their EHR documentation time and quality.
- Women physicians spend more time on the EHR overall, after hours, and on EHR-based documentation than male physicians.
- Volume of EHR use can be tracked and used to predict physician departure from practice.
Learn more with the AMA about how to take a systematic approach to reducing EHR inbox burden.
Get the latest news on physician well-being
Subscribe for insights and real-world solutions delivered straight to your inbox.
