Nurses are significantly less likely than physicians to report a strong EHR experience, a June 26 report from KLAS Research’s Arch Collaborative found.
The report, which surveyed more than 121,000 clinicians across 92 organizations between May 2025 and May 2026, found that while EHR satisfaction is improving overall, a persistent gap between nurses and physicians remains and in some measures is widening.
Here are seven key findings from the report:
- Only 12% of organizations that surveyed nurses reached the highest EHR satisfaction tier (Level 6: Elite), compared to 22% of organizations that surveyed physicians.
- Nurses are more than twice as likely as physicians to fall into the struggling tier. Twenty-one percent of organizations landed in the struggling tier for nurses, versus 10% for physicians.
- Among organizations that remeasured clinician EHR satisfaction between February 2025 and February 2026, the average Net EHR Experience Score increased by 6.2 points. Seven organizations saw score increases of 15 points or more.
- Ambient AI was cited as a clear bright spot for physicians, with many reporting major time savings, fewer after-hours charting hours and meaningful quality-of-life improvement. However, the report notes that a lack of quality training remains a barrier to broader adoption.
- Despite documentation improvements, reducing documentation burden remains the top-requested fix among nurses. Many describe the process as still too redundant and cumbersome.
- External data integration scored lowest across every EHR experience level for nurses, including among organizations that have achieved Elite status. Separately, 55% of physicians from a pool of more than 25,000 reported dissatisfaction with their EHR’s external integration.
- Fifty-nine percent of physicians, drawn from a pool of more than 25,000, reported their EHR does not enable efficiency. Among nurses, 79% from a pool of more than 80,000 reported losing time to unproductive charting.
The report recommends that organizations stagger initial EHR training over the first 90 days, ensure ongoing education is easy to find and access, and give clinicians a formal voice in EHR governance decisions. For EHR vendors, the report calls for faster system response times, improved external data integration and more meaningful upgrade communication tailored to the level of impact.
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