


Standardizing and rigorously reviewing their utility is essential. Making matters worse, these requirements vary from payer to payer in the United States. These astounding findings indicate that a big part of the problem is the documentation requirements that payers impose on providers. The study found that the average note length at the median health system in Canada, the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and Denmark is less than one third of what it is in the United States. To put the issue into context, if a physician sees 15 new patients, he or she would have to enter about 20 single space pages into the EHR. health systems using the same major EHR system found that at the median organization the length of the average patient note in an EHR has more than doubled from 2009 to be about 700 words. Standardize and reduce payer-imposed requirements. This is a problem that can be solved now by taking three steps.ġ. The annual cost of physicians spending half of their time using EHRs is over $365 billion (a billion dollars per day) - more than the United States spends treating any major class of diseases and about equal to what the country spends on public primary and secondary education instruction. This is true across primary care physicians and specialists, and it contributes to physician burnout. Physicians in the United States are justifiably upset by the amount of time they spend using electronic health records (EHRs).
