Pediatrician Electronic Health Record Time Use for Outpatient Encounters

The time providers spend using their electronic health records (EHRs) delivering care and its potential impact on patient care are of concern for the health care system. In studies to date, researchers have focused on providers who primarily care for adults. Scant information exists for pediatricians. Given this gap, it is important to quantify EHR activity for this group.

We studied pediatricians practicing in US-based ambulatory practices using the Cerner Millennium EHR by extracting data from software log files in the Lights On Network for the calendar year 2018 and summarizing the time spent on each of 13 clinically-focused EHR functions according to clinical specialty.

Our data included >20 million encounters by almost 30 thousand physicians from 417 health systems. Pediatric physicians spent an average of 16 minutes per encounter using their EHR. Chart review (31%), documentation (31%), and ordering (13%) functions accounted for most of the time. The distribution of time spent by providers using their EHR is highly variable within subspecialty but is similar across specialties. Because of data limitations, we were unable to examine geographic or health system-specific variation.

Pediatricians, like physicians who care for adults, spend a large portion of their day using their EHR. Additionally, although chart review and documentation accounted for 62% of the activity, as in previously published studies, in our study, we found that chart review accounted for half of that time. Wide variation suggests opportunities to optimize both the processes of entering information and searching for patient data within the EHR.