The Electronic Medical Records (EMR) confer advantages over paper records, but EMR usability must be distinguished from utility. In the context of delivery of quality care in ambulatory settings, specifically in time-constrained environment of the office visit, EMR impose administrative and cognitive costs on physicians who, in an ideal patient-centric encounter, would focus primarily on communicating with the patient. Thus, the objectives of the current study are to quantitatively profile physician EMR usage profiles based on mouse activity that is time stamped and manually coded to workflow. EMR-based primary care visits at a VA outpatient clinic were video recorded for 62 patients seen by 13 physicians. Hierarchical and sequential task analyses of physician EMR activity were conducted. Preliminary data suggest that physicians have unique EMR usage patterns.
