WATERTOWN, Mass., January 26, 2022 – athenahealth, Inc., a leading provider of network-enabled software and services for medical groups and health systems nationwide, today announced research insights that show significant differences in both patient interaction and appointment documentation practices between female and male clinicians. Female clinicians across specialties and clinical roles see fewer patients per week and spend a higher percentage of their electronic health record (EHR) documentation time outside of patient appointment hours when compared to male clinicians, the research found.

And though female and male clinicians spend the same amount of time on cumulative patient documentation per week, female clinicians spend more documentation time on a per-patient basis, scheduling an average of 60 encounters per week versus their male counterparts, who hold an average of 73 encounters per week, according to the study. The athenahealth findings show that gender differences in documentation minutes per patient encounter is at least 20% across most clinician specialties. More specifically:

In cardiology, female clinicians’ documentation time per encounter is 62% higher than male counterparts.
In neurology, female clinicians’ documentation time per encounter is 40% higher than male counterparts.

In orthopedic surgery, female clinicians’ documentation time per encounter is 33% higher than male counterparts.


“These findings represent another example of how the traditional, volume-based payment model for physician services contributes to gender inequities in healthcare,” said Jessica Sweeney-Platt, vice president of research and editorial strategy at athenahealth. “Female clinicians tend to spend more time with patients, which we’ve learned includes the amount of time they spend in capturing and documenting each patient’s story."



Ultimately, this requires that female clinicians sacrifice income, Sweeney-Platt said. "Value-based care models could change incentives around visit volume and reward clinicians for spending more time per patient, including capturing the full story of each patient. Over time, this shift in focus could have a big impact in alleviating burnout.”

The Impact of Delegation and Technology
In addition to gender specific patterns, the research found that if clinicians were able to delegate even 10% of documentation work to other members of a care team, they would be able to not only reduce overall time spent on documentation but could see reductions in the amount of time spent documenting after hours. The research showed that cardiologists would benefit the most from delegation, saving 3.2 EHR minutes per encounter (averaging nearly 3.5 hours per week) and reducing their EHR time outside of patient appointment hours by 2.1%.

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