Descriptive Analysis of Documentation Time for the National Developmental-Behavioral Pediatric Physician Workforce...

Area of Science:

• Pediatrics
• Health Informatics
• Healthcare Management

Background:

• The developmental-behavioral pediatric (DBP) workforce faces challenges meeting service demands.
• Inefficient documentation processes are a suspected contributor to these challenges, but DBP documentation patterns are understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate clinical practice patterns in DBP documentation.
• To identify strategies for addressing documentation burden in DBP practice.

Main Methods:

• Utilized descriptive statistics from a US Epic DBP provider dataset (n=483).
• Compared DBP documentation metrics against pediatric primary care (n=76,423), pediatric psychiatry (n=783), and child neurology (n=8589) providers.
• Employed one-way ANOVAs to analyze differences in outcomes among specialties.

Main Results:

• DBP providers showed a significantly increased burden in time spent per note and note length compared to other groups.
• Statistically significant differences were found between multiple outcome-specialty combinations.

Conclusions:

• DBP providers dedicate substantial time to progress note documentation, both during and outside clinic hours.
• Electronic health record (EHR) user activity data can quantitatively measure documentation burden.