My primary care physician said something to me around 2010 that I never forgot. He was frustrated — not burned out yet, just starting to name something. He said he was spending more time looking at his screen than at his patients, and it didn't feel like medicine anymore.
He left practice a few years later. I have a different doctor now.
Dr. Nishant Tripathi, a gastroenterologist writing on Doximity, described his Monday morning recently: one patient, a 30-minute window, an Epic chart with 23 problem list entries, and eight minutes spent excavating copy-pasted notes to locate twelve words explaining why she was there. He called it "chart bloat syndrome" and suggested it deserved an ICD-10 code.
He's not wrong. But I want to go further.
This isn't a documentation problem. It's an attention extraction problem — and the physician is the one paying.
The pitch was liberation
Electronic health records were federally incentivized with a promise: interoperability, continuity, information that followed patients and freed clinicians from paper. What the system actually built was a documentation infrastructure that serves billing, compliance, and institutional risk management — and placed the physician at the center of it as the required human translator.
Nearly 70% of primary care physicians believe the clerical tasks the EHR requires of them don't need a physician to complete. Almost three in four say the EHR contributes directly to their burnout. Outpatient physicians now spend up to twice as much time with their EHR as with their patients.
The physician became the friction point — the body the system passes its demands through on the way to getting paid.
What got extracted in that process? The thing that makes medicine medicine: a physician's full, present attention on another human being.
This is structural, not personal
When we talk about physician burnout, we still tend to land on individual solutions. Mindfulness. Time management. Learning to say no.
These aren't bad suggestions. They're aimed at the wrong level.
A physician spending two hours a day on documentation that protects the hospital and the insurance company — not the patient — is not failing at self-care. They are absorbing a structural cost the system decided they should carry. The exhaustion is not a character flaw. It is the predictable output of a machine designed to extract.
I made a decision early in building my practice not to take insurance. Partly because the intensive format I offer doesn't fit neatly into a billing code. But also because of what insurance actually does to the clinical hour.
Insurance wants a trauma opened, worked, and closed in 53 minutes or less — on repeat, session after session. They won't pay a penny over 54 minutes. And if too many sessions run to 53, they want to know why they aren't 45 more often.
I wanted to sit with clients and let them take the time their healing actually requires. Those two things are not compatible.
Insurance has never called me to ask whether a client is getting better. It calls to manage my clock.
The physician in the endoscopy suite isn't so different. The documentation doesn't exist to improve his patient's care. It exists to protect someone else's interests. He knows this. He does it anyway — because the alternative is not getting paid, or losing privileges, or worse.
That knowledge accumulates. Quietly, daily, across a career.
The accumulation is the thing
Coping tools help you manage the load in real time. They don't clear what's already there.
A physician a decade into a career shaped by chronic documentation burden, moral injury, and the persistent gap between the medicine they trained for and the medicine they're allowed to practice — that physician isn't just tired.
They are carrying accumulated stress that has reorganized how their nervous system responds to everything: to patients, to colleagues, to their own sense of competence.
Mindfulness helps you breathe through the next difficult moment. It doesn't reach back and resolve the ones that came before.
EMDR does. Not because it's magic — because it's designed specifically to process what's already been stored. The micro-stressors that compounded over a decade. The moments that felt like small failures but weren't. The grinding awareness that the system is taking something from you that it will not return.
Once that accumulation clears, stress management tools actually work better. The load doesn't disappear — but the nervous system carrying it is no longer already full.
The question worth asking
Dr. Tripathi ends his piece by asking: what's your strategy for surviving documentation overload?
It's a fair question. It's also the wrong one.
Survival strategies are for systems worth surviving. The better question is: what does it cost you to keep absorbing this — and what would it mean to actually set some of it down?
That's not a workflow question. It's a clinical one.
What did nobody tell you about what this career would actually ask of you?
EMDR Intensives at Clear Blue Sky are schedule-sensitive, out-of-network, and completely confidential. Strategy sessions are complimentary. If any of this landed, you can book one here → https://clearblueskytherapyconsulting.com/page/ei-general-book-a-strategy-session
Katherine Driskell is an EMDR therapist based in Minnesota, serving clients across the state and via intensive format.
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