While providing crucial access to a patient’s medical history, EHR has also contributed to an environment where completing computer templates and adhering to protocols garner more physician attention than the actual patient. In moments of full transparency, many doctors will admit that their biggest daily stress is related to completing EHR obligations — not to patient diagnostic and treatment issues. A 2017 study from the American Medical Association and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock health care system found that physicians spend nearly double their time on EHR demands as compared to direct clinical face-to-face time with patients. Quite simply and obviously, the EHR is not the patient!
As a medical caregiver for the past 29 years, I am aware that some reduction of physician EHR responsibilities would facilitate the movement of more doctor-patient interactions toward the ideal. Perhaps future AI innovations will alleviate some of this burden. But when a door is opened and a physician and patient meet in a private room, it is the responsibility of the doctor to make sure these connections happen. These interactions have, and always will be, the essence of medicine and cannot be compromised by providing care, both literally and figuratively, from 90 degrees. On this front, physicians can do better and patients should expect and demand better.
Michael Gerdis has worked as a specialist, a primary care practitioner and an emergency room physician, and is currently the chief of gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Doctors of Westchester. He has been passionate about health care since volunteering at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as an undergraduate student at University of Pennsylvania, after which he attended NYU Medical School and completed a gastroenterology fellowship at LIJ Medical Center. He has experienced the profound changes in medicine that have resulted in a profession that has become almost unrecognizable. He sees what we have lost, why we lost it, and why it is imperative we get it back.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost in April 2026.