Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital has configured its Epic electronic medical record to ensure clinical notes are kept short and to the point, has turned off many of its alerts and is not using voice recognition in an attempt to keep documentation to a minimum and hopefully avoid the problem of EMR-linked physician burnout that is plaguing the US health system.

While clinician burnout is a concerning feature of the local health system, it has not yet been tied to the overwork problem facing the US, where the federal government has announced it will introduce a “patients over paperwork” initiative and revise the E/M codes that it uses for medical billing for the first time since 1996.