The Impact of an Organization-Wide Electronic Health Record (EHR) System Upgrade on Physicians' Daily EHR Activity Time: An EHR Log Data Study

Abstract

Objective This article assesses the impact of a health care organization's electronic health record (EHR) upgrade on providers' daily EHR activity time. Methods Daily EHR activity time (minutes/day) was acquired through EHR log data that automatically tracks user activity. Subjects were attending and resident physicians in the departments of family medicine, hospitalist medicine, and the neonatal intensive care unit working in the inpatient setting. The EHR upgrade occurred in August 2020, and the comparison groups were pre-upgrade (May 31, 2020–July 25, 2020) and post-upgrade (August 30, 2020–October 31, 2020). A two-tailed, two-sample t-test was used to assess statistical significance. Results The pre-upgrade group had 146 users, and the post-upgrade group had 140 users. There was no statistically significant difference between the pre-upgrade group (mean (M): 104.74 minutes/day, standard deviation [SD]: 70.64) and post-upgrade group (M: 103.38 minutes/day, SD: 64.77), even after splitting the data by user type and user type and department. Conclusion This study showed no significant difference in daily EHR activity time post-upgrade. More research is needed to truly understand the impact of EHR upgrades on user efficiency. Understanding the content of each upgrade might be key in understanding their effect on users, and we hope to explore that in the future.

Clinical Errors From Acronym Use in Electronic Health Record: A Review of NLP-Based Disambiguation Techniques

“…There is a big need for a unified architecture that will support standardized interfaces for connecting different analytical engines made by different groups, allowing them to work together both in terms of meaning and process. After the passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act in 2009, the adoption of EHRs in the United States increased rapidly, with approximately 86% of office-based physicians and 96% of non-federal hospitals using an EHR system as of 2017 [106]. Other studies also shown that developed countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Denmark have made strides in the design and implementation of EHR as part of their national e-health infrastructure, though they have also struggled in their EHR mandate due to user resistance to EHR support for clinical processes, provider burnout, decreased satisfaction [106], [107], [108], [109], and EHR interoperability with other e-health systems [105].…”