Regardless of specialty, female physicians appear to spend more time in the electronic health record than men, according to research published Thursday in JAMA Network Open.
While such systems have helped transform the practice of medicine, they have also contributed to burnout. Previous studies have unearthed higher rates of such workplace fatigue among women, and researchers recently set out to determine whether EHRs are part of the problem.
Lead author Lisa Rotenstein, MD, MBA, and colleagues found a potential connection, with women spending an average of 41 minutes more in daily total time on EHR work. Same for time spent after hours (nearly 10 minutes more per day) and on EHR-based clinical documentation (31 minutes), after adjusting for various factors such as age and specialty.
“Our findings provide a potential mechanism for the gender gap in burnout, which has implications for workforce mental health and physician retention,” Rotenstein, with Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Department of Medicine, and co-authors wrote March 24. “They suggest that women physicians may benefit from policy changes, workflows, and technologies that reduce documentation burden, including scribes, team documentation, and artificial intelligence-powered solutions.”
Researchers retrospectively gathered their data from a large ambulatory practice network in New England, recorded between 2018-2019. The final tally included 318 nontrainee physicians (39% women), with nearly 73% age 45 or older. About half of the sample was primary care docs, 32% were medical specialists, and 13% worked in surgery.
Gender differences persisted after adjusting for hours worked, specialty and other factors, even with female docs caring for slightly fewer patients on average, Rotenstein et al. reported. Average daily total time spent in the EHR was about 5.8 hours for women vs. 5.23 for men; after-hours use was 0.91 vs. 0.75; and clinical documentation was 2.03 vs. 1.67.
“The observed gender differences are likely driven by inherent and socialized physician traits, as well as by gendered differences in patient and staff expectations of physician accessibility,” experts wrote in a corresponding editorial, later adding that “other studies have found that patients speak more and disclose more medical information to women vs. men physicians.”
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.