Background The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education expects resident duty hours to be monitored, yet no previous studies have examined the effect of after-hours electronic health record (EHR) use on resident hours or burnout. Objective We assessed internal medicine residents' perceived and actual time spent on after-hours outpatient EHR use and calculated increased duty hours if after-hours EHR use were included; we also assessed its effect on resident burnout. Methods We retrospectively aggregated time spent logged on to the outpatient EHR for residents in a general internal medicine clinic for 13 weeks in 2011. Residents completed a survey on EHR use, which was correlated with objectively recorded data on EHR usage. We compared actual and self-reported EHR time and identified violations that would be generated if these hours were included in reported duty hours. We also correlated resident after-hours EHR use with responses to an internally developed burnout survey. Results The 44 residents in this study overestimated time spent on the ambulatory EHR (they spent 3.03 hours/week on after-hours use compared with a recorded 1.20 hours/week). In total, 190 duty hour violations (mean duration of violation = 37 minutes) would have been generated if after-hours EHR usage were included in residents' reported duty hours. Conclusions Resident estimates of EHR use by residents were not accurate; including after-hours EHR use would increase the number of reported duty hour violations. There was no association between after-hours EHR use and resident burnout.
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