The More Cumbersome the EHR System, the Bigger the Drain on Revenue

The more time physicians spend dealing with electronic health record systems, the less money they make and the less time they have for providing care directly to patients, according to new data published in Health Affairs. The article says about half the time physicians spend working in EHR is during patient encounters. The other half of the time—when they’re not with patients, in other words—their time working within the EHR goes uncompensated, essentially. The authors considered 31 million EHR transactions involving 471 primary care physicians and 765,129 patient records between 2011 and 2014 in crunching the numbers. The data underscore the importance of working with intuitive EHR systems that support efficient data entry, both for a practice’s profitability and also to maximize the time the physicians spends with a patient.