Electronic health records (EHRs) allow physicians writing these notes to supplement traditional manual data entry with copied or imported text. However, copying or importing text increases the risk of including outdated, inaccurate, or unnecessary information, which can undermine the utility of notes and lead to a clinical error. The following study, conducted at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, evaluates the impact of a new EHR tool that distinguishes manual, imported, and copied text in hospital progress notes with character-by-character granularity to describe documentation practices by medical students, residents, and direct care hospitalists. After analyzing 23,630 notes written by 460 clinicians, less than one-fifth of note content was manually entered.