Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

Emoji use was stable from 2020-2024, then spiked in 2025. The authors don't attempt to explain it, but I bet AI is to blame. Anyone who has had to clean up AI comments riddled with stupid emojis from their code will understand this.

I wonder if some portion of these come from templates. Maybe there's a patient communication template that includes a telephone emoji, and it gets reused.

Health care workers are in a hurry when writing notes, so I doubt they're consulting their emoji pickers just to make their notes more interesting.

> Emojis are shown using the open-source Noto Color Emoji font due to copyright restrictions on other versions.

They say below a chart using the Apple Color Emoji font ^^;

Why is the maple leaf so commonly used? To mean autumn? Leaves in general? Canadians?

Adding "No smalltalk and no emojis" to the instructions helps a lot.

So healthcare workers are using chatgpt to write messages for patients and to summarize appointment notes?

Given what I see at my workplace I can completely believe this.

I've noticed the same thing for LinkedIn, etc corporate communications. All of a sudden every CEO and marketing leader is packing them in.

AI is to be blamed, you can tell a content was mostly written by an AI when every category had emojis all over. The concerning part however, now we have a strong indicator that healthcare is relying on AI slop, and I don’t know why do we still pay them high wages or at least, why there’s a “shortage” of the workers.

Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I don't think emojis should be used at all in health records… It reminds me of stories my mum would tell me about when she would get a résumé pre-digital, and there would be a mark/symbol on it, and it might meant the person is fat, black, wears glasses, etc...