Government Reports List Ways to Reduce Admin Burden of Electronic Medical Records
​[Thursday, February 27, 2020]
Electronic health records (EHRs) related administrative and regulatory burdens cause increased physician burnouts and leading to loss of productivity. A report by the DHHS’s Health IT office released this week lists ways to reduce the effort and time required to record information in EHRs, reduce the effort and time required to meet regulatory reporting requirements, and ways to improve the functionality and intuitiveness (ease of use) of EHRs. To reduce clinical documentation, EHR systems should utilize standardized and pre-authorized documents. To increase usability of the EHR, it is recommended to align the EHRs with clinical workflow, optimize user interface to improve the efficiency, experience, and end user satisfaction. The 73-page report provides detailed recommendations for EHR development, launch and implementations with rationale and tips for improvement based on 208 comments on more than 1400 pages received by the authors. This report is a must read for the developers of EHR systems. Although the users of the EHR: the physicians, nurses and other medical staff, may never read it, it may be productive for the administrators to use information in the report to create introductory and promotional presentations highlighting how they have addressed the common pain points with their HER solutions.