I hate to say it, but this is a giant one for me and most studies would show that this is also a source of burnout.

I also hate to pin it on one thing, but I’m gonna say the “Electronic Medical Record.”  The issue with it isn’t that it works poorly, the issue is the amount of time and energy it takes for us to interact with it.

 In my personal research, 100% of physicians would count it as a source of their burnout.  Since we know it’s a source of our driver burnout, I know for me personally:  an added hour plus to my day when we went fully electronic medical record with really a lot of the tasks being offloaded.  The best things that I did, and the studies will show there’s probably a 70 plus percent chance that the better you interact with your EMR, the happier you will be.

#1: LEARN

I think you need to learn as much as possible about your EMR, so then you can use it as effectively as possible because there’s a number of little tricks, tips, and presets and other things that really make it fairly easy to to use.  I think whatever your specific EMR is, you need to learn those things.

#2: USE VOICE INTERFACE

I still think I would recommend using some sort of a voice interface and some of the most advanced versions of those voice recognition systems are very, very good, like 99 plus percent. And they get all the two, too’s and to’s and all that they’re, there, and there’s correct.

I understand your frustration, I understand that electronic medical record is a big driver of burnout. I don’t think it’s going away. I do think there’s some benefits to it. So please make your peace with your electronic medical record.

Learn as much as you can.

Use Burkett recognition if you can.

Offload tasks if you can.

Use automated logging in and out as you can.

I hope this helps reduce your burnout using the EMRS and always remember, burnout recovery is for you!

~Jeff Moody, MD