Residents skip lectures to chart - aimee

Posted: Oct 16, 2013

"Maisara Rahman, MD, who helps train family-medicine residents at a county hospital in Moreno Valley, California, noticed a while back that attendance at her lectures was falling off sharply. Dr. Rahman hadn't become boring all of a sudden. Other faculty members were noticing a lot of empty seats during their talks as well. Had the family medicine residents caught a slacker virus? No, it turns out that they were skipping lectures, lunches, and even an occasional rotation, said Dr. Rahman, for the sake of documenting patient encounters in the electronic health record (EHR) system that their hospital implemented in May 2012. Switching from paper charts to electronic ones reduced resident productivity by 30%. Dr. Rahman told this story of digital deceleration last month in a poster presentation at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) in San Diego, California. She and her colleagues at Riverside County Regional Medical Center surveyed clinicians, most of them family-medicine residents, at their institution and at nearby Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center on how the roll-out of identical EHR systems affected their work. Of 122 clinicians surveyed, 99 returned the completed surveys for an 83% response rate. The average time it took residents at both hospitals to see a patient and chart the visit increased from 21 minutes to 37 minutes, the researchers found. Before the EHR debuted at Riverside, "some of us were really excited," Dr. Rahman told Medscape Medical News. "We thought it would improve patient care. "But when implementation started, we saw inefficiencies."