Today's clinical notes don't serve anyone particularly well. Cogent summaries are few and far between, having been replaced by templates that emphasize billability over interpretability. These long, overly detailed documents—with dozens of imported values ranging from test results to problem lists—manage to simultaneously over- and underwhelm. On the one hand, generating and reading such a note are time-consuming tasks that require substantial cognitive load and contribute to burnout (1, 2). Yet, the final product still fails to communicate much useful information (3), and much of what it does include may not even be accurate (4).
There is a critical distinction ...
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Author, Article, and Disclosure Information
Heather E. Gantzer,
Park Nicollet Clinic, Methodist Hospital, St. Louis Park, Minnesota (H.E.G.)
University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California (B.L.B.)
Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina (L.C.H.)
Hassanah Consulting, Seattle, Washington (J.T.)
Note: Dr. Gantzer currently serves as the Chair of the Board of Regents of the American College of Physicians.
Acknowledgment: The authors thank the members of the American College of Physicians Restoring the Story Task Force for their contributions and thoughtful perspectives in discussion of this topic.
Disclosures: Disclosures can be viewed at www.acponline.org/authors/icmje/ConflictOfInterestForms.do?msNum=M20-0934.
Corresponding Author: Heather E. Gantzer, MD, Park Nicollet Clinic, 3800 Park Nicollet Boulevard, St. Louis Park, MN 55416; e-mail, hgantzer@mac.
Correction: This article was corrected on 15 September 2020 to revise one of the abbreviations defined in the figure legend.
Current Author Addresses: Dr. Gantzer: Park Nicollet Clinic, 3800 Park Nicollet Boulevard, St. Louis Park, MN 55416.
Dr. Block: Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy and Sleep Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, 513 Parnassus Avenue, Room 1314, San Francisco, CA 94143.
Dr. Hobgood: Division of Internal Medicine–Pediatrics, Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University, 517 Moye Boulevard, 2nd Floor, Greenville, NC 27834.
Ms. Tufte: 412 Eleventh Avenue, No. 106, Seattle, WA 98122.
Author Contributions: Conception and design: H.E. Gantzer, B.L. Block, L.C. Hobgood.
Drafting of the article: H.E. Gantzer, B.L. Block, J. Tufte.
Critical revision of the article for important intellectual content: H.E. Gantzer, B.L. Block, L.C. Hobgood, J. Tufte.
Final approval of the article: H.E. Gantzer, B.L. Block, L.C. Hobgood, J. Tufte.
Administrative, technical, or logistic support: H.E. Gantzer.
Collection and assembly of data: L.C. Hobgood.
This article was published at Annals.org on 14 July 2020.
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