Survey: Physician EHR Satisfaction and EHR Productivity

Chip Hart from Pediatric EHR Solutions sent me the results of the Physicians’ Alliance of America EHR survey results. The chart that’s most interesting to me is this one that shows Productivity Levle with an EHR:
EHR Productivity Chart

If you look at this chart, it clearly illustrates that most doctors see EHR as damaging to their productivity level. No doubt, this chart has a strong connection with why many doctors dislike EHR. However, it’s worth also noting that this chart shows a doctors’ perceived productivity. Many times people think it’s more, but we aren’t great at actually measuring how much time it takes to do something. Plus, most doctors quickly write off the time they spent chasing down charts and other time savings that should also be associated with their productivity. Instead, they just focus on the time spent charting in paper against the time spent charting in an EHR. Unfortunately, there isn’t a really easy way to measure how the actual productivity level changed.

Regardless of whether EHR has really killed productivity level or not, perception is reality and so perception is very important. What’s even more interesting about this chart is that despite the perception that EHR hurts their productivity, 80% of those surveyed said they prefer electronic to paper. This figure seems at odds with the graph above.

I think this illustrates the reality of the future of EHR. It’s not going anywhere. Doctors aren’t leaving EHR to go back to paper. So, now we’re faced with the reality that we need to optimize our current EHR implementations so that they can be a productivity benefit to a practice in both perception and reality. Can we do that with meaningful use stage 3 continuing to kill EHR innovation?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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