Too Many Notifications in Electronic Health Records?

The burden of inbox notifications in electronic health records (EHRs) is one reason many clinicians have love–hate relationships with their EHR systems. In this study, researchers tabulated the number of EHR notifications received by 46 primary care physicians and 46 specialists at three large Texas practices during 125 workdays in 2015. The EHR systems used were Epic and General Electric Centricity.

On average, each primary care physician received 77 notifications per full workday; specialists averaged 29 notifications daily. Twenty percent of notifications to primary care physicians were test results. Extrapolating from other research in which clinicians spent an average of 52 seconds per processed message, the authors estimate that the pr…