Telehealth, replies to messages or a quick video consulation with a health care provider, are designed to save time for everyone and reduce costs.
It may also be causing greater rates of physician burnout, according to a recent paper. 
Female physicians seem to be impacted most, according to the survey results. They spend more time on them, but get more messages they feel are negative or demeaning , and more frequently list messages as a source of burnout.

Greta Branford, M.D., and colleagues looked at data from a year’s worth of patient portal messages handled by University of Michigan primary care physicians, and survey results.



Men and women spent just under an hour every day handling patient messages but female physicians were 60% more likely than male counterparts to say that portal messages required more clinical assessment and 76% more likely to say that messages contributed to burnout. 

Female physicians spent more time inputting orders related to patient messages per day, and writing notes documenting their clinical decisions. Female physicians reported receiving messages from patients that were negative or demeaning 60% more than men yet were twice as likely to regard the electronic health record system as easy to learn aand less likely than men to feel it inhibits quality care. 

Citation: Branford et al: The Gender Gap in EHR Workload: A Comparative Analysis of Primary Care Physician In Basket Usage, JGIM, DOI:10.1007/s11606-025-09629-w