The Creep of Extra Tasks: How More Work Keeps Getting Added to Physicians’ Plates

 
  • Growing EMR Burden on Physicians: Administrative and regulatory documentation tasks, once handled by supplementary staff, are increasingly pushed onto physicians, adding to their workload and contributing to fatigue and potential errors.

  • Impact on Physician Performance: The sheer volume of documentation requirements—such as coding, sepsis and stroke scoring, antibiotic timing, and COVID-19 risk assessments—heightens the risk of oversight, especially during long shifts.

  • Phrasefire’s Solution: A customizable physician workflow platform designed for licensed physicians and supervised residents to create and quickly access reminders, assessment+plans, notes, improving documentation compliance and reducing cognitive load.

Here’s an example of the increase in EMR tasks hospitalists are expected to do on the inpatient side. According to my clinic colleagues it is similar on the clinic side as well. Much of this chart review used to fall on supplementary staff. It is cost effective for systems to push these tasks onto the physician, so here we are.

This is not necessarily at my current or prior place of employment. Not a full list:

Coding, antibiotic timing verification , sepsis timing and volume of fluid , checking of sepsis and severe sepsis diagnosis, documentation of fluid timing, antibiotics timing, stroke and pneumonia scoring systems, Covid-19 risk assessment.

This is a sampling of what is required on every note by different agencies: both hospital and government regulatory bodies. With this amount of documentation, things do get overlooked or forgotten, especially as the fatigue of a 12 hour shift sets in.

In addition, physician error increases over time because of the nature of our job and the amount of patients seen.

Our solution is the Phrasefire platform. Reminders to a multitude of requirements can be baked into assessment+plans, notes. All data is manually input by the physician and shared easily cross platform.

Check us out at www.phrasefire.com

**This post and information contained in the platform is not a recommendation to treat specific patients. The information is useful to attendings, residents and students under supervision for educational reference.

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