ArticleHealth affairs (Project Hope)2017
Electronic Health Record Logs Indicate That Physicians Split Time Evenly Between Seeing Patients And Desktop Medicine.
Article in Health affairs (Project Hope), 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 176 papers, 7 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
176 citing papers in PubMed, 7 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Family physician perspectives on managing indirect patient care activities in the electronic inbox: a systematic mixed studies review.Family practice · 2025Pooled it
- The impact of compassion-based interventions on perioperative anxiety and depression: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Journal of affective disorders · 2024Pooled it
- Measuring Documentation Burden in Healthcare.Journal of general internal medicine · 2024Pooled it
- Improving Clinical Documentation with Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Review.Perspectives in health information management · 2024Pooled it
- Interaction Time with Electronic Health Records: A Systematic Review.Applied clinical informatics · 2021Pooled it
- How does medical scribes' work inform development of speech-based clinical documentation technologies? A systematic review.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2020Pooled it
- Using electronic health record audit logs to study clinical activity: a systematic review of aims, measures, and methods.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2020Pooled it
- Trial
- AI-Generated Draft Replies Integrated Into Health Records and Physicians' Electronic Communication.JAMA network open · 2024Trial
- Effect of Integrating Access to a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Within the Electronic Health Record on the Frequency of Queries by Primary Care Clinicians: A Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA health forum · 2022Trial
- Trial
- Patient Portal Usage and Outcomes Among Adult Patients with Uncontrolled Asthma.The journal of allergy and clinical immunology. In practice · 2020Trial
- Ontario family physician perspectives on whether and how to charge patients for uninsured services: Qualitative study.Canadian family physician Medecin de famille canadien · 2026Article
- Distilling Knowledge in Gastroenterology: An Artificial Intelligence System for Assisting Colonoscopy and Pathology Report Review.Mayo Clinic proceedings. Digital health · 2026Article
- Evaluation of an AI Medical Scribe After 236,153 Notes Generated Across Care Levels in a European Health System: Mixed Methods Retrospective Observational Study.JMIR medical informatics · 2026Observational
- Article
- The Interface of Artificial Intelligence and the Electronic Medical Record in Orthopaedic Surgery: Current Applications and Future Directions.Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Global research & reviews · 2026Review
- The Impact of Electronic Health Records on Family Physicians During Simulated Virtual Encounters: Exploratory Mixed Methods Study.JMIR medical informatics · 2026Article
- Perceptions of Health Care Professionals on the Integration and Use of AI in Clinical Cancer Care: Interview Study.JMIR human factors · 2026Article
- Review
116 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Time spent by physicians is a key resource in health care delivery. This study used data captured by the access time stamp functionality of an electronic health record (EHR) to examine physician work effort. This is a potentially powerful, yet unobtrusive, way to study physicians' use of time. We used data on physicians' time allocation patterns captured by over thirty-one million EHR transactions in the period 2011-14 recorded by 471 primary care physicians, who collectively worked on 765,129 patients' EHRs. Our results suggest that the physicians logged an average of 3.08 hours on office visits and 3.17 hours on desktop medicine each day. Desktop medicine consists of activities such as communicating with patients through a secure patient portal, responding to patients' online requests for prescription refills or medical advice, ordering tests, sending staff messages, and reviewing test results. Over time, log records from physicians showed a decline in the time allocated to face-to-face visits, accompanied by an increase in time allocated to desktop medicine. Staffing and scheduling in the physician's office, as well as provider payment models for primary care practice, should account for these desktop medicine efforts.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.