Table 1.
Physicians work activities
| Activity | Description | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Interacting with a patient and/or family | Talking with a patient and/or family; examining the patient; performing a procedure | Patient Care |
| Electronic Health Record input | Dictating or entering progress notes into the medical record; coding diagnoses and billing codes, signing paper or electronic records | EHR Input |
| Reviewing/planning | Reviewing patient medical records and/or test results; making plans for a patient; searching for guidelines or research information relevant to a patient | Patient Care |
| Communication about patients with: | ||
| Patient and/or family | Communicating via phone, email, letter, secure portal, etc., with or about a patient | Patient Care |
| Staff at office, hospital, or nursing home | ||
| Other healthcare providers | ||
| Insurance company, not prior authorization | ||
| Prior authorization | Obtaining prior authorization for medications, tests, procedures, devices, referrals, etc. | Admin Work |
| Pharmacy | Ordering or refilling prescriptions for patients. For time spent on prior authorization of medications, please click the “prior authorization” button | Admin Work |
| Workers’ Compensation | Reviewing records; preparing reports | Admin Work |
| Teaching/supervising | Teaching or supervising students, residents, or fellows | Teaching/Supervising |
| Administrative tasks/meetings | Meetings or other administrative tasks | Admin Work |
| Personal time | Meals, personal phone calls or emails, informal conversation with office staff not related to patient care, etc. | Personal Time |
| Other | Any activity not covered by the categories we have provided | Other |
List of the 14 activities from which physicians could choose. The Description column shows the short explanation of each activity that physicians could see in the app. The Category column shows the category (of six categories) in which we placed the activity, when selected as an exclusive category. Physicians often checked more than one activity for any given beep, so we also created combinations of activities and assigned each combination to one of the six categories (See Appendix Table A1)