"Note bloat," the increasing volume of notes and notifications posted in the EHR, is increasingly a cause for concern among physicians, . A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine supports this notion, finding primary care physicians receive an average of 76.9 total notifications per day.
Of those notifications, 20.2 percent on average were related to patient test results.
Building off prior findings from the Department of Veterans Affairs regarding how many minutes physicians spend each day processing notifications, the researchers suggest primary care physicians using commercial EHRs spend an average of 66.8 minutes a day processing these notifications, "which likely adds a substantial burden to their workday."
The study analyzed EHR notifications at three medical practices in Texas, two of which used Epic EHRs and one which used GE Centricity.
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