Post #3022642

2026-04-16 09:54 UTC

Actually it is worse than I noticed the first time I read the paper. I'm not really clear how they got down to 186 respondents with burnout info (the PRIMARY OUTCOME I remind myself). The difference between the 200 number that I expected and the 186 whose data is included is bigger than the number of respondents whose data is excluded because they did <5 consultations with the ambient scribe. Did some respondents skip those questions maybe? Too bad the participant flowchart doesn't say. But at least this statement is pretty clear: "Among 186 participants included in the burnout models,"

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@nyhan@fediscience.org 2026-04-16 10:12

The time savings bit that the blogger-physician called "striking" and gave at 26%, I am not sure how to interpret that part of the study. From the paper: "reduce time spent documenting after hours (mean [SE] difference, 0.90 [0.19] hours; P < .001)" Table: afterhours documentation time from 4.95 to 4.05 - not clear what the units are. Maybe minutes per consultation? "Our participants reported the equivalent of 10.8 minutes saved per workday after intervention. " "These factors may explain why scribe-assisted encounter documentation is associated with only modest time savings, highlighting the need for future support of additional EHR tasks." "Despite these small changes in documentation time, the significant change in burnout suggests that these small improvements may have an outsized influence or that other aspects of the intervention may improve overall clinician experience." Author call the time savings "modest" and "small". Blogger-physician calls them "striking".

Open ##3022643