Female ophthalmologists may have higher documentation burden
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Female ophthalmologists may have a higher documentation burden than male ophthalmologists, which could lead to more burnout, according to a poster presented at Real World Ophthalmology.
Sofia De Arrigunaga, MD, MPH, and colleagues wrote that physicians spend more than 5 hours on the electronic health record for every 8 hours of scheduled patient time. However, current metrics may not fully reflect the EHR burden.
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“Previous work highlights female clinicians spend more time on EHR compared to their male colleagues,” they wrote. “Difference in EHR use is a potential mechanism for the known gender gap in burnout and work-life integration.”
De Arrigunaga and colleagues explored how two novel metrics, encounter closure time (ECT) and documentation lag (DocLag), might reveal differences in EHR burden among practicing ophthalmologists. ECT was defined as the amount of time elapsed between initiation of the patient encounter and closure of all encounter-associated documentation, while DocLag was defined as the median chart closure time for a given reported period.
The analysis included data for 26,942 patient encounters between January and December 2021 for 18 attending ophthalmologists (11 women, seven men) at Boston Medical Center (BMC).
The median DocLag was 28.7 ± 26 minutes for female ophthalmologists compared with 14.7 ± 6.2 minutes for male ophthalmologists, but the difference was not statistically significant.
De Arrigunaga and colleagues wrote that they believe the new EHR metric better reflects documentation burden.
“We will correlate DocLag and selected EHR use metrics to measures of burnout and professional fulfillment from the BMC Clinician Vitality Survey taken by BMC clinicians,” they wrote. “Demographic data will allow for evaluation of trends based on age and race/ethnicity.”
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De Arrigunaga S, et al. Characterization of a new EHR-derived burnout metric (DocLag). Presented at: Real World Ophthalmology; Nov. 5, 2022 (virtual meeting).
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