Docs Receive 77 EHR Notifications Daily

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

On average, primary care physicians spend more than an hour a day attending to the over 70 EHR notifications they can expect to receive.

Doctors continue to be plagued with electronic alerts from EHRs, according to a study published by JAMA International Medicine. “Examples of types of notifications include test results, responses to referrals, requests for medication refills, and messages from physicians and other healthcare professionals,” explains the report.

Researchers analyzed the electronic logs of notifications by 92 physicians in three large practices. They found that the mean number of alerts received daily was 76.9, more than 20 percent of which were related to test results. Fierce EMR notes all of these alerts eat up doctors’ time, leading to more than an hour a day spent dealing with the notifications they receive from their EHRs.

Specialists reported receiving 29.1 total notifications a day, of which 10.4 percent related to test results.

“Information overload is of emerging concern because new types of notifications and ‘FYI’ (for your information) messages can be easily created in the EHR (vs in a paper-based system). Furthermore, the additional workload to read and process these messages remains uncompensated in an environment of reduced reimbursements for office-based care,” concluded authors.

This isn’t the first time experts have suggested that alerts are burdening doctors. Health IT Outcomes reported an overwhelming number of alerts can lead to alert fatigue, where physicians tend to become desensitized to alerts over time. This can lead to physicians ignoring potentially critical alerts because of the sheer frequency of their occurrence.