Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa ISSN 2576-1986 (Print) ISSN 2576-1994 (Online) Original Paper The Effect of Electronic Medical Records on Nurses’ Job Satisfaction: A Multi-Year Analysis William G. Johnson 1 , Perry M. Gee 2 , Lesly A. Kelly 3 & Richard J. Butler 4,5* 1 Department of Biomedical Informatics, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA 2 Intermountain Healthcare, Nursing Research, Salt Lake City, UT, USA and College of Nursing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA 3 Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona, USA 4 Brigham Young University, Economics, Provo, Utah 5 Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China * Richard J. Butler, email: richard_butler@byu.edu Received: May 19, 2021 Accepted: June 2, 2021 Online Published: June 9, 2021 doi:10.22158/uspa.v4n3p1 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/uspa.v4n3p1 Abstract To measure nurses’ rankings of their electronic medical records (EMRs) on their job satisfaction over time, a retrospective analysis of a set of cross sectional data from a survey conducted by the United States’ California Registered Nursing Board in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016. Approximately 4,500 nurses ranked the usefulness of their EMRs in each of the five years. The EMR rankings increased steadily between 2008 and 2016 but the changes are small and the rates of change are very slow, suggesting that the problems with EMRs have been difficult to solve. The results show EMRs have a large impact: a one category increase in EMR rankings increased job satisfaction by as much as or slightly more than one-third for hospital and non-hospital nurses. The size of the effects and their persistence over eight years imply a substantial loss from poorly designed EMRs, and one which could have been avoided had EMR designs more closely matched nurses’ day to day work. The reductions in job satisfaction and potential effects on burnout are losses to be added to the more widely measured losses in productivity and negative effects of EMRs on patient-provider relationships. Keywords informatics/information technology, urban health policy, work environment/working conditions, care delivery system, nurse-patient relationships 1