11 ways to win back time in your EHR

The electronic health record was supposed to give physicians time back. For most, it has done the opposite. Of the average 57.8-hour physician workweek, only 27.2 hours go to direct patient care, while 13 hours disappear into order entry, documentation, results and referrals, according to AMA Organizational Biopsy data. The rest of the day, and a chunk of the evening, belongs to the keyboard.

That after-hours work has a name and a cost. Pajama time, the charting that spills past 7 p.m., has barely budged even as overall burnout has eased, and a third of physicians still report symptoms. More than half of burned-out physicians point to the EHR as a contributor, according to the KLAS Arch Collaborative, which pegs the cost of losing a single physician to burnout-driven turnover at roughly $87,000.

Here is the part vendors rarely advertise: most of that lost time is recoverable with the EHR a practice already owns. The biggest gains come from configuration, training and workflow, not from a rip-and-replace. Practices that treat the EHR as a system to be tuned, rather than endured, consistently report less after-hours charting and higher satisfaction. Here are 11 places to start.