The Impact of an Organization-Wide Electronic Health Record (EHR) System Upgrade on Physicians' Daily EHR Activity Time: An EHR Log Data Study

Objective This article assesses the impact of a health care organization's electronic health record (EHR) upgrade on providers' daily EHR activity time. Methods Daily EHR activity time (minutes/day) was acquired through EHR log data that automatically tracks user activity. Subjects were attending and resident physicians in the departments of family medicine, hospitalist medicine, and the neonatal intensive care unit working in the inpatient setting. The EHR upgrade occurred in August 2020, and the comparison groups were pre-upgrade (May 31, 2020–July 25, 2020) and post-upgrade (August 30, 2020–October 31, 2020). A two-tailed, two-sample t-test was used to assess statistical significance. Results The pre-upgrade group had 146 users, and the post-upgrade group had 140 users. There was no statistically significant difference between the pre-upgrade group (mean (M): 104.74 minutes/day, standard deviation [SD]: 70.64) and post-upgrade group (M: 103.38 minutes/day, SD: 64.77), even after splitting the data by user type and user type and department. Conclusion This study showed no significant difference in daily EHR activity time post-upgrade. More research is needed to truly understand the impact of EHR upgrades on user efficiency. Understanding the content of each upgrade might be key in understanding their effect on users, and we hope to explore that in the future.