Impact of an Online Gastrointestinal Symptom History Taker on Physician Documentation and Charting Time: Pragmatic Controlled Trial.

Background: A potential benefit of electronic health records (EHRs) is that they could potentially save clinician time and improve documentation by auto-generating the history of present illness (HPI) in partnership with patients prior to the clinic visit. We developed an online patient portal called AEGIS (Automated Evaluation of Gastrointestinal [GI] Symptoms) that systematically collects patient GI symptom information and then transforms the data into a narrative HPI that is available for physicians to review in the EHR prior to seeing the patient.

Objective: This study aimed to compare whether use of an online GI symptom history taker called AEGIS improves physician-centric outcomes vs usual care.