Who hasn't sat in a medical office, listening to computer keys clacking while their provider rapidly types up notes, wondering what they are spending so much time writing about? For doctors, who have always written clinical care notes but increasingly must spend time cataloging billing details, this additional documentation is a major source of job dissatisfaction and burnout. A new study out today by University of Maryland's School of Public Health illuminates a solution that can meaningfully reduce the amount of time doctors spend writing notes, without losing vital information. "Providers are already stretched thin and under intense pressure to see more patients all while documenting large amounts of information.
So we looked at how using medical scribes and other forms of teamwork for documentation can reduce that burden," says Nate Apathy, assistant professor of Health Policy and Management. Apathy's current research focuses on sources of technology-based burden in health care and strategies to reduce it. Apathy's study, "Physician EHR Time and Visit Volume Following Adoption of Team-Based Documentation Support", was published today in JAMA Internal Medicine with collaborators from the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Minnesota.
The results show that collaborating on clinical documentation with other team members can help give doctors and other providers more time to spend on patient care. In this study, "team-based documentation" refers to .