Ridiculous Study of the Week: EHRs Are Problematic
You wanted answers to physician burnout? Well, you got it! Some of the most brilliant research minds in the world decided to rack their brains and find the source of the problem. And here are the conclusions from the JAMA article:
HIT (Health Information Technology) -related stress is measurable, common (about 70% among respondents), specialty-related, and independently predictive of burnout symptoms.
Wow! Now why haven’t doctors known this? And why haven’t doctors been complaining about this?
Okay, I can’t even go on with my sarcasm anymore. My tongue is actually hurting my cheek.
It probably took years to do this simple study and for what? I’ll tell you for what. It allows the SEVEN authors of:
Physician stress and burnout: the impact of health information technology
…to win “Ridiculous Study of the Week”. Congrats, everyone!
P.S. One last thing. To be fair, EHRs are not really the issue. It’s the system that makes doctors do useless clicks and metrics on the EHR that kills them. Add a tremendous amount of patients that exacerbates the amount of documents to click on and you have a recipe for disaster. I don’t have that issue in Direct Primary Care. I only have 600 patients and my Atlas.MD EHR is awesome, which makes my life so much easier.
And this was only one state. And only half the doctors participated in the survey. Maybe doctors elsewhere are happier? (sarcasm) But just MAYBE studies like these will start getting people to listen and actually DO something to fix things.
Don’t hold your breath ????
You’re being too harsh on the authors. It’s always good to have data documenting what seems obvious to most of us. If nothing else, it demonstrates the complete failure of the AAFP to represent the interests of the membership – not that they give a flying f**k.
Actually, the data shows that they give <0.01f**ks (10 mF), significance p<0.05.