Female surgeons may spend more time on EHRs outside scheduled hours vs. male surgeons
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Key takeaways:
- Female surgeons spent more time in EHR systems outside of scheduled hours and wrote longer notes vs. male surgeons.
- Overall time spent on EHRs was similar between male and female surgeons.
Published results showed female surgeons spent more time in electronic health record systems outside of scheduled hours and wrote longer documentation notes despite having fewer appointments and fewer records compared with male surgeons.
Karen Malacon, BA, a medical student in the department of neurosurgery at Stanford University Medical Center, and colleagues performed a cross-sectional study of EHRs from 222,529 patient encounters with 224 attending surgeons from a single institution between January 2022 and December 2022.
Malacon and colleagues analyzed EHR note length, documentation length, time spent in the EHR system and time spent documenting patient encounters. They compared these data between 68 female surgeons and 156 male surgeons who were in practice for a mean of 14 years.
According to the study, the most common surgeons were general surgeons (20%) and orthopedic surgeons (20%). General surgery had the highest proportion of female surgeons (51%), while orthopedic surgery had the highest proportion of male surgeons (84%).
Overall, male surgeons had more appointments per month (78.3 vs. 57.8) and completed more EHRs per month (43 vs. 29.1) compared with female surgeons. However, Malacon and colleagues found female surgeons spent more time logged into the EHR system outside of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (36.4 vs. 14.1 minutes per month), more time logged into the EHR system outside of scheduled clinic hours (134.8 vs. 105.2 minutes per month) and more time per note (4.8 vs. 2.5 minutes) compared with male surgeons.
In addition, female surgeons wrote longer inpatient progress notes (6,025.1 vs. 4,307.7 characters per note), longer outpatient document notes (6,321.1 vs. 4,445.3 characters per note) and a higher fraction of the notes manually (17% vs. 12%) compared with male surgeons.
“This study’s results suggest the need for a comprehensive understanding of gender differences in EHR usage among surgeons and the associated implications,” Malacon and colleagues wrote in the study. “These findings have important implications for understanding the differential burdens faced by female surgeons, including potential contributions to burnout and payment disparities,” they concluded.
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