Defining Documentation Burden (DocBurden) and Excessive DocBurden for All Health Professionals: A Scoping Review.

Objectives:  Efforts to reduce documentation burden (DocBurden) for all health professionals (HP) are aligned with national initiatives to improve clinician wellness and patient safety. Yet DocBurden has not been precisely defined, limiting national conversations and rigorous, reproducible, and meaningful measures. Increasing attention to DocBurden motivated this work to establish a standard definition of DocBurden, with the emergence of excessive DocBurden as a term.

Electronic health records and clinician burnout: A story of three eras.

Objective: The study sought to provide physicians, informaticians, and institutional policymakers with an introductory tutorial about the history of medical documentation, sources of clinician burnout, and opportunities to improve electronic health records (EHRs). We now have unprecedented opportunities in health care, with the promise of new cures, improved equity, greater sensitivity to social and behavioral determinants of health, and data-driven precision medicine all on the horizon. EHRs have succeeded in making many aspects of care safer and more reliable.

The wave has finally broken: now what?

In 2005, the authors published a paper, 'Will the wave finally break? A brief view of the adoption of electronic medical records in the United States', which predicted that rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHR) would occur in the next 5 years given appropriate incentives. The wave has finally broken with the stimulus of the health information technology for economic and clinical health legislation in 2009, and there have been both positive and negative developments in the ensuing years. The positive developments, among others described, are increased adoption of EHR, the emergence of a national network infrastructure and the recognition of clinical informatics as a medical specialty.