Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2843883

26•giuliomagnifico•3h ago

Comments

anonlinc77•1h ago

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.

jasonsb•50m ago

> Anyone who has had to clean up AI comments riddled with stupid emojis from their code will understand this.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji.

As for emojis appearing in EHRs, a more likely explanation is the growing presence of Gen Z professionals in healthcare, who are known for integrating emojis into their communication. This trend probably has little to do with AI and more to do with generational habits.

zenethian•45m ago

I just had Claude generate a readme for me and it added at least 10 emoji to it.

nnnnico•43m ago

> I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji.

do you read this code? I find it hard to believe unless you have llm instructions in your codebase that you are not aware of

Wowfunhappy•36m ago

Claude (the only model I use regularly) will definitely add emojis to non-code documentation and/or commit messages (which I almost never let it write, but it will sometimes try). However, I can't recall Claude ever adding emoji to code or in comments.

zem•33m ago

it has added emoji to shell script status output for me (green ticks, red crosses, etc)

Wowfunhappy•30m ago

Oh, yes it will do that sort of thing, I forgot about that. I don't think I mind in that context?

jasonsb•21m ago

I always read and review the code and it's true that the old models from 2023/2024 were using a lot of emojis. But that code was garbage. Since LLMs have started to write decent code, I haven't seen one emoji.

RicoElectrico•43m ago

In the conversational mode it shits them like crazy. Depends on a particular fine-tune though.

bpt3•37m ago

Gen Z has been entering the professional workforce (post college age) since approximately 2020, so I don't think they're to blame.

AI generated text is littered with emojis in my experience as well, often used as bullets in the lists it loves to generate.

kube-system•35m ago

I don't think an 8x spike over a year would be in any way explained by a demographic shift.

I think your personal experiences are anecdotal, unique, and not representative of EHR users.

jasonsb•25m ago

Well, it is. Let's say that AI adds emojis to my code/text. Me, a millennial who hates emojis, will tell the AI to delete those emojis and never use them again in my code or my official documents. The gen Z guy who got his first job last week will love to keep them.

VanTheBrand•20m ago

Most people using LLMs wouldn’t even know you could tell it not to produce emoji. You are thinking about this like a coder not like a doctor.

0x1ch•10m ago

I'm Gen Z, also an engineer. I wouldn't bother removing them from the comments, but I wouldn't add them myself lol.

nonethewiser•32m ago

Emojis are not widely used on platforms that dont make them easy to add. IE medical software on windows.

>I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji.

Yeah because they dont just add them to any generated code. Although if you ask them to make some sort of UI that might involve graphics, they will happily add lots of emojis. They do add them very liberally, especially in headings, for writing articles, blog posts, repots etc.

nonethewiser•35m ago

>Emoji use was stable from 2020-2024, then spiked in 2025.

That's from the article? Yeah I think there should be pretty much no doubt about that.

Simulacra•38m ago

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...

bpt3•35m ago

There's absolutely no benefit to using them, and there are technical and non-technical issues they can cause.

I don't think you're in the minority, and even if you (we) are, you are still correct.

SoftTalker•24m ago

> I don't think emojis should be used at all in health records…

Strike "in health records" and you've nailed it.

derbOac•10m ago

In the article they state "We found that emojis were sent in portal messages to patients aged 70 to 79 years at the second highest rate, after those aged 10 to 19 years" which implies some of this at least is in messages to patients.

I can see sending emojis as a way of trying to be friendly and informal in communications with patients, especially if the patients have already used them.

Patients are all different so I can see some of them hating their use, but I can also see some patients appreciating a more lighthearted tone.

Pediatrics in particular is full of this kind of stuff in general.

jskrn•8m ago

Agree with your first part. On the second part, what??

jawns•24m ago

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.

pingou•13m ago

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

Cloudflare acquires Astro

6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available

Michelangelo's first painting, created when he was 12 or 13

Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence

Just the Browser

Lock-Picking Robot

Launch HN: Indy (YC S21) – A support app designed for ADHD brains

Elasticsearch was never a database

STFU

Reading across books with Claude Code

Slop Is Everywhere for Those with Eyes to See

Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory

Read_once(), Write_once(), but Not for Rust

Zep AI (Agent Context Engineering, YC W24) Is Hiring Forward Deployed Engineers

LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

The Alignment Game

Our approach to advertising

Show HN: 1Code – Open-source Cursor-like UI for Claude Code

Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

How to wrangle non-deterministic AI outputs into conventional software? (2025)

List of individual trees

Feature Selection: A Primer

Training my smartwatch to track intelligence

Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

psc: The ps utility, with an eBPF twist and container context

East Germany balloon escape

Interactive eBPF

Earth from Space: The Fate of a Giant

Independent Guest Virtual Machine (IGVM) File Format

Cloudflare acquires Astro

6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available

Michelangelo's first painting, created when he was 12 or 13

Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence

Just the Browser

Lock-Picking Robot

Launch HN: Indy (YC S21) – A support app designed for ADHD brains

Elasticsearch was never a database

STFU

Reading across books with Claude Code

Slop Is Everywhere for Those with Eyes to See

Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory

Read_once(), Write_once(), but Not for Rust

Zep AI (Agent Context Engineering, YC W24) Is Hiring Forward Deployed Engineers

LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

The Alignment Game

Our approach to advertising

Show HN: 1Code – Open-source Cursor-like UI for Claude Code

Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

How to wrangle non-deterministic AI outputs into conventional software? (2025)

List of individual trees

Feature Selection: A Primer

Training my smartwatch to track intelligence

Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

psc: The ps utility, with an eBPF twist and container context

East Germany balloon escape

Interactive eBPF

Earth from Space: The Fate of a Giant

Independent Guest Virtual Machine (IGVM) File Format

Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

Comments