According to a study published in 2018, physicians who implemented team-based documentation experienced increased visit volume and reduced time spent on EHR documentation. JAMA Internal Medicine.
The national longitudinal cohort study analyzed weekly EHR metadata from September 2020 to April 2021.
Of the 18,265 physicians included in the study, 1,024 physicians adopted team-based documentation support. Team-based documentation approaches include traditional in-person scribes, virtual scribes, or collaborative note-taking with non-physician clinical members of the care team.
Physicians who used these approaches experienced a 6.0% increase in weekly visit volume and a 9.1% reduction in documentation time.
The benefits of team-based documentation support became even more evident over time. After 20 weeks, visits per week increased by 10.8% and documentation effort decreased by 16.2%.
The authors suggest that this period allowed practitioners and their teams to refine collaborative workflows and become familiar with team-based clinical documentation.
However, the study found that only those physicians who used the method very intensively (physicians whose notes were written by others for more than 40%) experienced a reduction in documentation effort.
For high-intensity users, researchers found that time spent taking notes decreased by 21% (approximately one hour less time spent per week on documentation) and that EHR time outside of scheduled work hours decreased by 10%.
Among those who rarely used team-based clinical documentation, there was no significant change in EHR time but a similar increase in visit volume.
The study authors suggest that low acceptance could indicate incomplete training, lack of organizational support, or other deficiencies in the program.
“Operationally tracking the proportion of note text written by others could be helpful in identifying and addressing implementation issues that have limited the use of collaborative documentation and prevented the full realization of its benefits,” the researchers write.
Hannah Nelson has been covering news related to health information technology and health data interoperability since 2020.
