Electronic Health Record–Based Messages to Primary Care Providers: Valuable Information or Just Noise?

Murphy, Daniel R., Brian Reis, Himabindu Kadiyala, Kamal Hirani, Dean F. Sittig, Myrna M. Khan, and Hardeep Singh. "Electronic Health Record–Based Messages to Primary Care Providers: Valuable Information or Just Noise?" Archives of Internal Medicine. 2012;172(3):283-285, February 13, 2012.

From the article: "Communication between clinicians is critical to coordination of care and prevention of adverse outcomes in the outpatient setting. Increasing the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and medical home-based care models will greatly increase electronic communication between different members of the health care team.1-3 One method of clinician-to-clinician communication is note-based messaging through the EHR, where the recipient is requested to provide their "additional signature" to a message to attest that it was received. We recently found that primary care providers (PCPs) receive a large number of EHR-based additional signature request (ASR) alerts and spend considerable time processing them.4 Large numbers of messages5-6 might also cause PCPs to miss certain higher-priority notifications." Read more

See Also

McDonald, Clement J. and Michael H. McDonald. INVITED COMMENTARY—Electronic Medical Records and Preserving Primary Care Physicians' Time: Comment on "Electronic Health Record–Based Messages to Primary Care Providers." Arch Intern Med. 2012;172(3):285-287, February 13, 2012.