Question

1. In the article below, HER fatigue has been identified as having a negative impact on physicians’ performance. Using economic models demonstrate the impact of this situation on the productivity of physicians and the cost of patient care So I need to graph this also in a supply,demand type graph. I keep getting confused on what to graph

EHR Fatigue

10 June 2020Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

Electronic health records (EHR) are supposed to improve quality. While EHRs certainly are highly useful for information sharing, they may have adverse consequences. One issue may be that EHRs may induce fatigue in physicians and sap their needed energy/concentration away from their primary task: caring for patients.

To test whether EHRs increase physician fatigue and impact efficiency, a paper by Khairat et al. (2020) looked at ICU physician use of EHR. The authors test for fatigue using pupillometry and efficiency, using metrics such as mouse clicks, time, and number of EHR screens needed to complete a task. They find:

All physician participants experienced physiological fatigue at least once during the exercise, and 20 of 25 participants (80%) experienced physiological fatigue within the first 22 minutes of EHR use. Physicians who experienced EHR-related fatigue in 1 patient case were less efficient in the subsequent patient case, as demonstrated by longer task completion times (r = −0.521; P = .007), higher numbers of mouse clicks (r = −0.562; P = .003), and more EHR screen visits (r = −0.486; P = .01).

Answer 1

In the graph, supply curve shows the availability of physicians in the market. Demand curve represent consumer's demand for physicians. Y axis represent cost of treatment and X axis represent amount of treatment that consumers can get in this economy.

According to the study, EHR use reduces efficiency of physiologists. This means that since their work involves fatgue, they might demand a higher price for their jobs. Some might also leave the market and take job somewhere else. Hence, this represents a leftward shift in supply curve. As a esult, the availablity of physiologists drop and number of visits also drop. At the same time, cost of treatment will increase for patients: