Doctors spending less time on EHR documentation following coding requirement changes
Medical Economics May 22, 2023
But time reduction is “not clinically meaningful,” study finds
A Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) effort to reduce physician EHR documentation burden has fallen short of its predicted results, a research letter in JAMA Health Forum concludes.
Early in 2021 CMS modified its evaluation and management (E/M) coding requirements for outpatient visits to eliminate the need for history and physical exam documentation. The agency estimated the changes would reduce documentation time by an average of 19 seconds per visit.
To measure the impact of the changes, a team of researchers analyzed time spent on EHR documentation among more than 18,000 physicians nationwide from September 2020—before the changes were implemented–through...