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The Story: New research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network finds that physicians are spending less time with their patients and more time on the computer logging electronic health records.

The activity of 1,052 ambulatory physicians was documented over 115 weeks before, during, and after the pandemic. The results of the study show that physicians have seen their time working in the electronic health records (or EHR for short) increase by almost 30%.

The time ambulatory physicians spent in EHRs per their eight scheduled hours went from 4.53 before the pandemic to 5.46 hours in September of 2021.

Given the decrease of physicians’ time spent with patients, the researchers suggested that, “Health systems may need to adjust productivity expectations for physicians and develop strategies to address EHR documentation burden for physicians.”

As telemedicine has expanded, EHR productivity expectations have changed for physicians, incentivizing spending more time logging records instead of face-to-face time with patients.

The Expert Take: Alex Mason, partner at FTV Capital, isn’t convinced that the increase of EHR time for physicians is a bad thing, however:

Last week, Amazon announced that Prime customers can receive a One Medical healthcare membership for $9/month or $99/year. Mason believes this is a unique opportunity in telehealth: “We’ve really never seen an experiment like this in healthcare. It’s the application of telemedicine, virtual care, the user experience a patient has on an app, and at the same time not ignoring that this is all about networking providers.”

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