How much time do doctors spend on documentation?

Doctors spend about 1.8 hours on records and desk work for every hour they spend with patients ¹. The number comes from a 2016 time-and-motion study of US physicians, and a 2017 EHR log study of primary care physicians also found heavy time in the record. The exact figure depends on the specialty, the clinic and how the clinician writes notes, so treat the 1.8 ratio as a typical value, not a fixed rule.

Physicians spend about 1.8 hours on records and desk work for every hour with patients

In a 2016 time-and-motion study of US physicians, clinicians spent 27.0 percent of their office time in direct face time with patients and 49.2 percent on EHR and desk work ². That works out at about 1.8 hours of EHR and desk work for each hour with patients ¹. The practices in that study were self-selected high performers in four specialties, so the ratio is not a national estimate.

The electronic health record is where most of that work happens. Documentation, order entry, billing and coding all count toward the total, and only part of it is note writing.

An EHR log study measured 5.9 hours in the system on a weekday

A 2017 study of primary care physicians used EHR user-event logs and direct time-motion observation at one academic health system. It found that clinicians spent 355 minutes, or 5.9 hours, of an 11.4-hour workday in the EHR on each weekday ³. Of that EHR time, 269 minutes fell during clinic hours and 86 minutes fell after clinic hours ⁴.

The after-hours figure matters for the question of documentation. Work that spills past the clinic day is often note completion, which is the part a scribe or a dictation tool can shorten. The study covers one primary care system in 2016, so it describes that setting rather than the whole country.

Self-reported times run higher than observed times

Measurement method changes the answer. In a Western Australian hospital, observers found that nurses and midwives spent 28.1 percent of morning shifts on clinical documentation ⁵. Nurses and midwives in the same study reported 50.4 percent of morning shifts when asked ⁶. These are nurses, not physicians, but the gap is a useful warning. A survey can overstate documentation time by a large margin, so check a survey figure against direct observation or an EHR log where you can.

How you write the note changes the minutes

Note-writing method also changes the time. In Epic's analysis of ambulatory physicians, those who mainly used transcription and dictation spent 4.8 minutes per visit on notes ⁷. Physicians who mainly copied and pasted spent 13.1 minutes per visit on notes ⁸. These are adjusted associations in observational data, not the result of an experiment, so they show a pattern, not a cause.

It depends on the specialty, the setting and the visit

• Specialty. A primary care clinician with many follow-up visits and a clinician who sees a few complex patients produce different amounts of documentation.
• Setting. Clinics differ in how much desk work sits outside the visit, so a figure from one practice may not carry over to another.
• Method. Time-motion studies, EHR logs and self-reports measure different things. A figure from one method is not directly comparable with another.

What to do: measure your own documentation time before you change tools

1. Ask your EHR administrator whether the system can report time spent in the record, such as user-event or audit logs.
2. Record a short time sample of your own notes for a week, including after-hours work.
3. Compare your figure with the 1.8 ratio above, and with colleagues in your specialty if you can.
4. Choose a tool, whether a dictation app or an ambient scribe, only after you know where the minutes go. The guide to AI medical scribes explains how each option fits a visit.

This page gives general information about documentation time. It does not advise on your own workload or your health. If the hours are hurting your wellbeing, talk with your clinic leadership or occupational health service. For related questions, see what an ambient AI scribe is and whether AI scribes reduce physician burnout. For the wider subject, see our overview of dictation for work and study.