How a physician documents patient encounters in an electronic health records system can impact the quality of care his or her patients receive, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. In a study led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, 9 percent of the physicians dictated their notes by telephone, which were transcribed and uploaded into the EHR; 68 percent of them used structured documentation in the EHRs, such as templates; and 62 percent typed their notes in free text into the EHRs. The researchers found that the quality of care appeared "significantly worse" for those who dictated over the phone than for physicians using the other two documentation styles on three of 15 measures. –Read the full article on FierceEMR