RT Journal
A1 Murphy DR, Reis B, Kadiyala H, et al
T1 Electronic health record–based messages to primary care providers: Valuable information or just noise?
JF Archives of Internal Medicine
JO Archives of Internal Medicine
YR 2012
FD February 13
VO 172
IS 3
SP 283
OP 285
DO 10.1001/archinternmed.2011.740
UL http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archinternmed.2011.740
AB 
Communication between clinicians is critical to coordination of care and prevention of adverse outcomes in the outpatient setting. Increasing the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and medical home-based care models will greatly increase electronic communication between different members of the health care team.1- 3 One method of clinician-to-clinician communication is note-based messaging through the EHR, where the recipient is requested to provide their “additional signature” to a message to attest that it was received. We recently found that primary care providers (PCPs) receive a large number of EHR-based additional signature request (ASR) alerts and spend considerable time processing them.4 Large numbers of messages5- 6 might also cause PCPs to miss certain higher-priority notifications.7- 8 Whether ASR alerts and other types of electronic messaging (called “routing” in some systems) are relevant to patient care or just a medium for distributing legal risk is unclear.9