NEJM November 13, 2019
Widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has transformed patient care. While prior studies have linked EHR use to physician burnout, understanding different approaches to EHR use facilitates a more nuanced understanding of this relationship. Prior work has revealed that physician gender is tied to burnout as well as to patient expectations and outcomes. Therefore, in this study, we sought to understand differences in EHR use patterns — across an array of measures related to time spent on documentation, approaches to EHR documentation, and use of EHR tools — by physician gender for all ambulatory physicians (n = 1,336) at a large academic medical center. Measures were derived from EHR access logs and were reported on a per-physician-per-6-week-period basis over...