Patients Dislike Your Computer Use

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Patient satisfaction declines when providers use computers during visits, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

A research paper published by JAMA Internal Medicine reports patient satisfaction declines when patients see their provider using a computer during their office visit. Patients with chronic conditions were interviewed by researchers before and after their appointments, asked to rate the quality of their care over the preceding six months.

According to iHealth Beat, patients rated care as excellent in about 50 percent of the 25 encounters with high computer use, compared with more than 80 percent of the 19 encounters with low computer use.

“When people are paying attention to the same thing at the same time, you get the best transmission of information,” Richard M. Frankel of the Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, who wrote an editorial accompanying the story. “Technology in the exam room is neither good nor bad inherently,” but doctors can use specific techniques to help patients get comfortable with it, he said.

Doctors who spent more time on the computer were found to spend less time making eye contact with patients and tended to do more negative rapport building, such as correcting patients about their medical history or drugs taken in the past based on information in their EHR.

But using the computer is sometimes necessary for doctors, especially since much patient information is stored in EHRs. “Just under half of my patients have limited health literacy and about half speak a language other than English,” said Dr. Neda Ratanawongsa of the University of California, San Francisco and co-author of the research letter. “The computer helps me know about their health and their health care. The hard part is figuring out how to help care teams access and add to this information AND still stay present with patients in the room.”

“Many clinicians worry that electronic health records keep them from connecting with their patients,” said Ratanawongsa according to Reuters. “So it's not surprising that we found differences in the way clinicians and patients talk to each other,” she said.