Chart navigation is becoming the hardest part of care

The EHR has the information. Finding it is the challenge.

“Could my new meds be making me tired?” asks the patient sitting on an exam table. But the physician doesn’t answer because she’s scrolling past two years of progress notes on the patient’s chart. The patient repeats the question. The physician looks up from her screen and says, “Let me check the medications tab.” With her eyes back on her screen, she clicks and clicks again, as the patient waits.

This increasingly familiar scenario is frustrating for both the clinician and patient. And regrettably, the scene repeats itself thousands of times a day. The reason? Electronic health records (EHRs) now hold more clinical data than ever—more visits, more results, and more history. But storing information and making relevant information accessible at the right time are not the same thing.

Interoperability can give clinicians access to information from across a patient’s care journey, but making more information available is only part of the challenge. Clinicians must also be able to find relevant patient data quickly. Having access to the right information at the right time has become one of the main challenges in day-to-day care.¹

This isn’t simply an EHR workflow challenge. When a doctor can’t quickly locate a crucial detail—an allergy, a recent dose change, a specialist’s notes—the result can be a decision made from an incomplete picture. That has the potential to elevate chart navigation from an efficiency issue to a care quality challenge.

Fortunately, AI-assisted retrieval is emerging as a genuine solution, not to replace clinical judgment but to get the right data in front of a clinician faster.

The modern patient chart contains more information than ever before

The adoption of EHRs has made patient information more readily available across the care journey. But greater access has resulted in clinicians needing help navigating the increasingly complex records. A chart with 10 years of notes doesn’t help a clinician who has 10 minutes to find one relevant detail. Plus, richer data often means duplicate entries such as the same lab result imported twice, medication lists that don’t reconcile, and repetitive notes. In fact, according to a PMC article from 2025, an analysis of provider EHR documentation showed 60% growth in note length and 11% growth in note redundancy from 2009 to 2018.²

The problem isn’t that charts contain too much data. It’s that the tools for navigating charts haven’t scaled at the same pace.

When finding information becomes part of the clinical workload

An unintended result of EHR software? Patient chart reviews have become difficult to complete under real clinical conditions. In a simulation study of 25 ICU physicians and trainees³, researchers measured EHR efficiency through task completion time, mouse clicks, and the number of screens clinicians visited. All participants experienced fatigue during the exercise, and 80% experienced fatigue within the first 22 minutes of EHR use. Plus, all this clicking and scrolling takes time and focus away from the patients.

Constant task-switching also creates a particular type of strain.  A clinician moves from listening to the patient, to searching the chart, back to the conversation, and back to the screen. Each switch taxes working memory and divides attention which becomes more stressful over the course of a day. Searching isn’t a side task anymore, it’s become a cognitive burden⁴, competing for the same bandwidth as diagnosis and patient rapport.

How poor chart navigation affects care quality

The consequences show up in the exam room. When data retrieval is slow or incomplete, clinicians sometimes make decisions without the full picture. Time pressure makes this worse. In a visit with a hard stop, a clinician may decide to stop searching before they’ve found relevant information, simply because the allotted time is up. That’s not a failure of diligence; it’s a rational response to a tool that takes too long to yield an answer. This is frustrating for clinicians. According to the 2026 athenahealth Physician Sentiment Survey, 63% of respondents said they are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information in patient charts, so much so that 59% say it increases their stress levels.

The hidden costs of searching instead of caring

The costs of this problem extend past the exam room. When physicians spend more time navigating the chart than they do engaging with the patient, the effects are both human and financial.

Clinicians describe the experience in strikingly consistent terms: fragmented attention, mounting frustration, and the sense that they’re fighting the tool rather than being supported by it. That frustration doesn’t stay contained to one workday — it accumulates.

Patients notice, too. Less eye contact, more scrolling and clicking, longer pauses while a clinician searches — these moments can make a visit feel transactional rather than personal.

And the costs don’t end when the appointment does. Chart review that couldn’t happen during the patient visit gets pushed to after-hours catch-up, which carries real operational costs for practices and is a well-documented contributor to clinician burnout. In fact, research from the AMA found that more than 20% of physicians reported spending more than eight hours per week on EHRs outside normal working hours, with little improvement year over year.⁵

The result? A chart navigation problem inside a 15-minute visit becomes a staffing and retention problem for the organization as a whole.

Why smarter information retrieval is the next evolution of EHR

For most of the last decade, health IT innovation focused on reducing clinical documentation burden by introducing voice recognition, structured templates, and more recently, ambient scribing technology that captures patient-clinician conversations in real time. These innovations have made it quicker and easier to add notes to a patient’s chart.

But ironically, the improvements surfaced a new problem: capturing information faster doesn’t help if clinicians can’t find it when it matters. Clinic operators are increasingly running into the inverse challenge — not a shortage of documentation, but a lack of fast, reliable access to the documentation that already exists.

The next meaningful gain for the EHR won’t come from holding more data. It’s going to come from retrieving it intelligently, surfacing the right note, the right result, the right history, when a clinician needs it. This is a patient care initiative as much as a productivity one. Faster access to the right information provides crucial clinical decision support, and it also directly affects how clinicians feel about the tools they use every day.

Looking ahead: AI can help clinicians find what matters most

One promising use of AI is helping clinicians navigate large volumes of patient information. It is particularly well suited for quickly sifting through pages and pages of patient data and medical records, organizing it, and making it usable at the point of care. That said, the role of AI is to augment clinical judgment not to replace it.  The goal isn’t automated decision making. Rather, it’s faster, more reliable access to the information clinicians need to make confident decisions.

Tools like Chart Assistant with Sage™ and Patient Overviews reflect this direction by using AI to help clinicians tap into relevant medical history, summarize longitudinal records, and are designed to cut through duplicate or outdated data without asking them to slow their workflow to do it.

The future of the EHR will depend not only on how much information it can hold, but on how effectively it surfaces relevant information for clinicians when it matters — so more of the time in the room can remain focused on the patient.