Nurses often complain that they spend more time doing paperwork and other administrative tasks than they do caring for patients. As it turns out, they aren’t exaggerating.

Documentation consumes more than a third of nurses’ time, followed by care coordination at 20 percent, patient care activities at 19.3 percent, medication administration at 17.2 percent and patient assessment at 7.2 percent, according to a new time-motion study supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.