Physicians negatively affected by EHRs

Editor's Note

Physicians are more likely to leave the profession or reduce their hours if they are uncomfortable using electronic health records (EHRs), the January 24 Medical Economics reports.

Although EHRs have the potential to enhance quality of care and clinical coordination, they also increase risk of physician burnout, reduce efficiency, and increase clerical burden.

Recommendations that may help ease physician adoption of EHRs include having physicians become more involved in design and improvement of EHR processes and making it a federal requirement for interoperability among systems.

With EHR implementation entering its optimization phase, the user experience on the physician side should be improving, the report says.

Until recently, most doctors created their own workflows and utilized only the technology they were comfortable using. But with the implementation of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act) in 2009 to stimulate the adoption of electronic health records (EHR), many physicians are finding things a bit too stressful.

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