Patient progress notes have become long and overwrought due to cut-and-paste functions and expandable templates in electronic health records (EHRs), leading to “note bloat.” The effort needed to read and sift through long progress notes in the EHR has been cited as a cause of stress and burnout among clinicians in multiple studies.
Some organizations are attempting to reduce note bloat. The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), in a letter to federal health regulators in January 2019, recommended decoupling clinical documentation from billing to reduce IT-related clinician burdens.