Assessment of EHR Efficiency Tools and Resources Associated with Physician Time Spent on the Inbox.
retrospective_cohort · Level III
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38717666.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1007/s11606-024-08761-3 and PMC identifier 11436598.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Physicians are experiencing an increasing burden of messaging within the electronic health record (EHR) inbox. Studies have called for the implementation of tools and resources to mitigate this burden, but few studies have evaluated how these interventions impact time spent on inbox activities. Explore the association between existing EHR efficiency tools and clinical resources on primary care physician (PCP) inbox time. Retrospective, cross-sectional study of inbox time among PCPs in network clinics affiliated with an academic health system. One hundred fifteen community-based PCPs. Inbox time, in hours, normalized to eight physician scheduled hours (IB-Time<sub>8</sub>). Following adjustment for physician sex as well as panel size, age, and morbidity, we observed no significant differences in inbox time for physicians with and without message triage, custom inbox QuickActions, encounter specialists, and message pools. Moreover, IB-Time<sub>8</sub> increased by 0.01 inbox hours per eight scheduled hours for each additional staff member resource in a physician's practice (p = 0.03). Physician inbox time was not associated with existing EHR efficiency tools evaluated in this study. Yet, there may be a slight increase in inbox time among physicians in practices with larger teams.
Medical subject headings
- Electronic Health Records
- Physicians, Primary Care