Yes, I agree with this finding. From my own experience and perspectives from my peers, using EMR can lead to physical and mental burnout while it gives many advantages at the same time.
From EMR user point of view
Poor internet connection – It is very distressing when the connection is down as workflow are disrupted and delayed especially during busy hours.
Eye strains and cervical spondylosis – After using EMR for 2 years in our hospital, most of my friends increased lens power and got neck stiffness, due to too many screens time.
Increase workload – Since we cannot fully adopt EMR system (due to consultants’ nature), we also use paper-based patient’s chart. Therefore, we have double data entry and workload.
EMR design and built-in functions – our EMR system need to be fully online to operate, and it has so many steps just to note progress, order tests and prescriptions. Moreover, some medication interaction alerts are too overwhelming. (e.g. the system notifies even if a patient is prescribed dual anti-platelets)
Dependent steps – if the attending doctor is busy and cannot order a lab test in the system, the nurses cannot proceed with the following steps of drawing the blood and send the blood tube to the lab. Patients’ cares are so much delayed in these scenarios. We even sometimes face patients’ complaints and dissatisfactions due to the delay.
From the patient’s point of view
Less patient interaction – as the doctors and nurses are busy in front of the screen with documentation and ordering test/medication, they have less patient exposure time, and this can jeopardize quality of care and patients’ satisfaction.
Missed important clinical signs – doctors can also miss clinical signs due to the burnout. As we are treating the patient not just the disease, more focus should be kept on the patients.
Ways to reduce these problems
Increasing the manpower – Since the workload is increase, the manpower should also be increased.
Task-shifting – one of the strategy our hospital used is that they appointed nurses/pharmacist to do the EMR task so that doctors can pay more attention to patient care.
EMR design and functionality – some EMR can cache the data locally and synchronize and upload the stored data when online, this can avoid the delay of tasks when the internet connection is unstable.
EMR design should be more user friendly with few steps.
Data minimization – to avoid redundancy and duplication.
Feedback loops and review the workflow – regular feedback meeting with EMR users and adapt/upgrade the system as necessary.