CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · ACI open 2022; 06(02): e94-e97
DOI: 10.1055/s-0042-1757156
Case Report

The Impact of an Organization-Wide Electronic Health Record (EHR) System Upgrade on Physicians' Daily EHR Activity Time: An EHR Log Data Study

Lori Wong
1   Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
,
Kevin W. Sexton
1   Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
2   Department of Surgery, UAMS College of Medicine, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
3   Department of Health Policy and Management, Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
,
Joseph A. Sanford
1   Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
5   UAMS Institute for Digital Health & Innovation, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
6   Department of Anesthesiology, UAMS College of Medicine, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
› Author Affiliations
Funding Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Center For Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers UL1 TR003107, KL2 TR003108, TL1 TR003109, and R01 GM111324. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Abstract

Objective This article assesses the impact of a health care organization's electronic health record (EHR) upgrade on providers' daily EHR activity time.

Methods Daily EHR activity time (minutes/day) was acquired through EHR log data that automatically tracks user activity. Subjects were attending and resident physicians in the departments of family medicine, hospitalist medicine, and the neonatal intensive care unit working in the inpatient setting. The EHR upgrade occurred in August 2020, and the comparison groups were pre-upgrade (May 31, 2020–July 25, 2020) and post-upgrade (August 30, 2020–October 31, 2020). A two-tailed, two-sample t-test was used to assess statistical significance.

Results The pre-upgrade group had 146 users, and the post-upgrade group had 140 users. There was no statistically significant difference between the pre-upgrade group (mean (M): 104.74 minutes/day, standard deviation [SD]: 70.64) and post-upgrade group (M: 103.38 minutes/day, SD: 64.77), even after splitting the data by user type and user type and department.

Conclusion This study showed no significant difference in daily EHR activity time post-upgrade. More research is needed to truly understand the impact of EHR upgrades on user efficiency. Understanding the content of each upgrade might be key in understanding their effect on users, and we hope to explore that in the future.

Protection of Human and Animal Subjects

No human subjects were involved in the project.




Publication History

Received: 06 July 2021

Accepted: 06 June 2022

Article published online:
12 October 2022

© 2022. The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

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Rüdigerstraße 14, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany

 
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