For every hour physicians provide direct clinical face time to patients, nearly 2 additional hours is spent on EHR and desk work within the clinic day. Outside office hours, physicians spend another 1 to 2 hours of personal time each night doing additional computer and other clerical work.
That is the conclusion of a paper just published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
Outpatient doctors spend at least twice as long proving they provide medical care for billing and compliance purposes as they do actually providing it. “To Err is Human” is more apt than the IOM ever realized.