January 16, 2026
Paging Dr. 😂
Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing
Doctors are emoji-ing your medical notes — AI blame, template drama, maple leaf mystery
TLDR: Emoji use in medical records jumped in 2025 after years of flat numbers, mostly in messages to patients. Commenters are split between blaming AI and boring templates, debating whether emojis make care friendlier or undermine professionalism, with bonus laughs over a mysterious maple leaf and a font mix‑up.
Doctors and nurses are quietly dropping emojis into your electronic health record (EHR)—the digital file of your medical history—and the internet is split between giggling and panicking. A University of Michigan study scanned 218 million notes and found emojis in 4,162 of them, with a sudden jump to 10.7 per 100,000 notes in late 2025. Cue the comment wars: one camp screams, “It’s AI,” blaming automated tools for the surge, while another insists it’s boring old templates being reused to save time. The pearl-clutchers argue emojis don’t belong in serious medical charts, calling it unprofessional and potentially misleading; the pragmatists say a smiley in a portal message helps stressed patients understand tone.
There’s comedy too: someone asked why the maple leaf keeps popping up—is it autumn, plants, or just Canadians? And a font nerd called out the paper for saying emojis were shown in Noto while the figure looked like Apple’s set. The study says patients can’t add emojis in the Epic portal, yet staff use them most in portal messages and telephone encounters, mostly smileys and emotions. Translation: clinicians are trying to be human, the internet is arguing about robots, and everyone’s counting 🍁 for better communication.
Key Points
- •The study analyzed 218.1 million EHR notes (2020–Q3 2025) at Michigan Medicine, identifying 4162 notes with 372 distinct emojis.
- •Emoji usage rates were stable (1.4 per 100,000 notes) from 2020–2024, rising to 10.7 per 100,000 by Q3 2025.
- •Portal messages to patients were the most common emoji-containing note type (35.5%), followed by telephone encounters (28.5%).
- •Patients cannot enter emojis in the Epic portal; none were found among 34.5 million patient portal messages.
- •Qualitative coding of 200 notes showed most emojis were introduced by clinical teams (89.0%), intended primarily for patients/family (64.0%), with high interrater reliability (κ up to 0.95).