The 25 by 5 Symposium on electronic documentation burden among clinicians is a scientific meeting designed to reduce current clinical electronic documentation burden by 25% in the next 5 years. Documentation burden has become a growing national concern with the increased adoption and use of electronic health records, leading to increased clinician burnout and associated negative impacts on patient care such as increased medical errors and hospital acquired infections. The 25 by 5 symposium will gather experts from diverse sectors (e.g., government, academia, industry) and professional backgrounds (e.g., medical and nursing providers, scientists) to propose both a taxonomy for understanding and measuring clinician electronic documentation burden and a set of action items for reducing it. Specific meeting goals include: 1) Create a meeting that engages a diverse group of key stakeholders and leaders focused on reducing documentation burden, 2) Assess the likely potential for burden reduction within each category of documentation burden tasks, including identifying `low hanging fruit' for `quick wins', 3) Establish approaches for immediate (<3 months) and short-term (6 months) reduction in clinical documentation burden, and 3) Generate approaches to longer term (10 years) elimination of clinical documentation burden. The symposium proposal is guided by Lewin's Field Theory framework so that we will: identify and engage critical and facilitating change actors (key stakeholders), outline driving and restraining forces to implementing our solution, and evaluate our proposed plans for change according to their potency and amenability. The goal is for key stakeholders to leave the conference with a clear plan for implementing proposed solutions with iterative improvement based on feedback and learning.
With the increased adoption and use of electronic health records, clinical documentation burden has become a national concern as it has led to increased clinician burnout and associated negative effects on patient care such as increased medical errors and hospital acquired infections. The 25 by 5 Symposium will bring together experts from diverse sectors that have an impact on documentation burden in order to propose immediate, short-term, and long-term approaches for reducing and ultimately eliminating clinical documentation burden. The outcome of this symposium is likely to improve well-being and professional satisfaction of providers (e.g., physicians and nurses) and subsequently, improve patient care and patient outcomes.
