After finding that doctors spend the bulk of their EHR usage moving in between clinical documentation and order entry, I helped prototype and design new ways to think about clinical notes.
Leaned into growing capabilities of web technologies to support a rich and interactive experience.
Outcomes
I built several prototypes that were inspired by different forms of WYSIWYG text editors to take advantage of web tech that could dynamically react to user input to engage in contextualized behaviors.
I validated that inline order entry was viable and seamless if designed to work with existing clinical documentation systems.
Details
Inspired by faceted database search, Epic SmartPhrases, and other technologies around contextual text editors, we designed approaches for speeding up how doctors do order entry within clinical notes.
We explored using databases like RxNorm, UMLS, and other medical ontologies in order to contextualize free text into categories like medicine, laboratories, and more.
We designed interfaces that reacted to context-specific actions to trigger things like medication ordering or lab result retrieval, falling back on well-known drop-down entry forms as a form of confirmation (shown below).
We ran usability studies with doctors using our ActiveNotes system vs. their EHR in order to quantify time-savings and reduction in cognitive burden from not needing to switch between screens.
We also ran user interviews to understand what practitioners thought of a ’note-centric’ EHR design and identified that additional layers of automation (such as automatic classification of content into the right section of the note) would be helpful and welcome.
