Providers Develop Personalized Patterns With EHRs

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

JAMIA research finds that, while providers may be using the same EHR, they tend to develop personalized patterns of use.

Despite the fact that physicians may be using the same EHR system, they tend to develop their own personalized patterns of use. These patterns vary greatly between doctors, even though they are accessing the exact same information. They may use different navigation techniques through the records or have difficulty using certain features of the records system.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association sought to find out why so many EHR studies had inconclusive or conflicting results. “Studies of the effects of electronic health records (EHRs) have had mixed findings, which may be attributable to unmeasured confounders such as individual variability in use of EHR features,” explains the report’s abstract.

Researchers analyzed the results of 112 physicians and nurse practitioners in encounters with nearly 100,000 patients. EHR usage metrics were developed to capture how providers accessed and added to patient data (e.g., problem list updates), used clinical decision support (e.g., responses to alerts), communicated (e.g., printing after-visit summaries), and used panel management options (e.g., viewed panel reports).

Becker’s Hospital Review points out, “Results indicated a high level of user variability. For example, the average proportion of encounters with problem lists while accessing patient data was between 5 percent and 60 percent per provider.”

Researchers concluded, “Providers using the same EHR developed personalized patterns of use of EHR features. We conclude that physician-level usage of EHR features may be a valuable additional predictor in research on the effects of EHRs on healthcare quality and costs.”