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Updated: Nov 7, 2025

Methodology for Establishing a Community-Wide Life Laboratory for Capturing Unobtrusive and Continuous Remote Activity and Health Data
Published on: July 27, 2018
Time-motion examination of electronic health record utilization and clinician workflows indicate frequent task
Amanda J Moy1, Jessica M Schwartz2, Jonathan Elias1,3
1Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics, NY, NY.
Abstract:
Clinical documentation burden has been broadly acknowledged, yet few interprofessional measures of burden exist. Using interprofessional time-motion study (TMS) data, we evaluated clinical workflows with a focus on electronic health record (EHR) utilization and fragmentation among 47 clinicians: 34 advanced practice providers (APPs) and 13 registered nurses (RNs) from: an acute care unit (n=15 observations [obs]), intensive care unit (nobs=14), ambulatory clinic (nobs=3), and emergency department (nobs=15). We examined workflow fragmentation, task-switch type, and task involvement. In our study, clinicians on average exhibited 1.4±0.6 switches per minute in their workflow. Eighty-four (19.6%) of the 429 task-switch types presented in the data accounted for 80.1% of all switches. Among those, data viewing- and data entry-related tasks were involved in 48.2% of all switches, indicating documentation burden may play a critical role in workflow disruptions. Therefore, interruption rate evaluated through task switches may serve as a proxy for measuring burden.
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