Physicians with their own practices are more satisfied with EHRs, study finds

By Giles Bruce for Becker’s Hospital Review

Physicians who own their practices are more satisfied with their electronic health records than physicians who don’t, an April 21 investigation in JAMA Network Open found.

The researchers looked at 1,368 responses to the 2019 National Electronic Health Records Survey and found that 68.1 percent of respondents in physician-owned practices reported satisfaction with their EHRs compared to 58.5 percent at nonphysician-owned offices.

Physicians with their own practices were more likely to say they had adequate time for documentation and available staff support. The authors said, however, that practice ownership didn’t fully explain the differences in satisfaction levels and that future research could look at the influence of practice structure and culture, workflow and EHR design.

In an invited commentary April 21 in JAMA Network Open, Richard Baron, MD, president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine, theorized a reason for the difference in satisfaction with EHRs is that physicians in larger systems were often just trained on how to use EHRs to get “meaningful use” payments from the government and not on how the EHRs could improve patient care.