A new paper published by I2DB faculty and students in the Journal of General Internal Medicine looks at associations between clinicians’ secure messaging use and workload. Congratulations to Dr. Daphne Lew, first author, and Dr. Sunny Lou, senior author, along with co-authors, Dr. Thomas Kannampallil, and doctoral students Laura Baratta and Linn Xia on this exciting publication.
The researchers found that days with higher secure messaging were associated with more time spent in the electronic health record (EHR) in general and more frequent attention-switching in the EHR. Based on these results, they concluded that secure messaging use may contribute to increased clinician workload and cognitive burden, pointing to the need for healthcare institutions to develop guidelines regarding best practices for clinician-to-clinician secure messaging use.