Electronic health record system use and documentation burden of acute and critical care nurse clinicians: a mixed-methods study.

OBJECTIVES: Examine electronic health record (EHR) use and factors contributing to documentation burden in acute and critical care nurses. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A mixed-methods design was used guided by Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. Key EHR components included, Flowsheets, Medication Administration Records (MAR), Care Plan, Notes, and Navigators. We first identified 5 units with the highest documentation burden in 1 university hospital through EHR log file analyses. Four nurses per unit were recruited and engaged in interviews and surveys designed to examine their perceptions of ease of use and usefulness of the 5 EHR components. A combination of inductive/deductive coding was used for qualitative data analysis. RESULTS: Nurses acknowledged the importance of documentation for patient care, yet perceived the required documentation as burdensome with levels varying across the 5 components. Factors contributing to burden included non-EHR issues (patient-to-nurse staffing ratios; patient acuity; suboptimal time management) and EHR usability issues related to design/features. Flowsheets, Care Plan, and Navigators were found to be below acceptable usability and contributed to more burden compared to MAR and Notes. The most troublesome EHR usability issues were data redundancy, poor workflow navigation, and cumbersome data entry based on unit type. DISCUSSION: Overall, we used quantitative and qualitative data to highlight challenges with current nursing documentation features in the EHR that contribute to documentation burden. Differences in perceived usability across the EHR documentation components were driven by multiple factors, such as non-alignment with workflows and amount of duplication of prior data entries. Nurses offered several recommendations for improving the EHR, including minimizing redundant or excessive data entry requirements, providing visual cues (eg, clear error messages, highlighting areas where missing or incorrect information are), and integrating decision support. CONCLUSION: Our study generated evidence for nurse EHR use and specific documentation usability issues contributing to burden. Findings can inform the development of solutions for enhancing multi-component EHR usability that accommodates the unique workflow of nurses. Documentation strategies designed to improve nurse working conditions should include non-EHR factors as they also contribute to documentation burden.

Use of Electronic Health Records and Documentation Burden Among Nurses in Acute and Critical Care.

Nurses who provide the majority of hands-on care for hospitalized patients are disproportionately affected by the current state of electronic health records (EHRs), and little is known about their lived perception of EHR use. Using a mixed-methods research design, we conducted an in-depth analysis and synthesis of data from EHR usage log files, interviews, and surveys and assessed factors contributing to the nurse documentation burden in acute and critical at a large academic medical center. There remain substantial spaces where we can develop viable solutions for enhancing the usability of multi-component EHR systems.

Standardizing nursing data extracted from electronic health records for integration into a statewide clinical data research network.

BACKGROUND: Care plans documented by nurses in electronic health records (EHR) are a rich source of data to generate knowledge and measure the impact of nursing care. Unfortunately, there is a lack of integration of these data in clinical data research networks (CDRN) data trusts, due in large part to nursing care being documented with local vocabulary, resulting in non-standardized data. The absence of high-quality nursing care plan data in data trusts limits the investigation of interdisciplinary care aimed at improving patient outcomes. OBJECTIVE: To map local nursing care plan terms for patients' problems and goals in the EHR of one large health system to the standardized nursing terminologies (SNTs), NANDA International (NANDA-I), and Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC). METHODS: We extracted local problems and goals used by nurses to document care plans from two hospitals. After removing duplicates, the terms were independently mapped to NANDA-I and NOC by five mappers. Four nurses who regularly use the local vocabulary validated the mapping. RESULTS: 83% of local problem terms were mapped to NANDA-I labels and 93% of local goal terms were mapped to NOC labels. The nurses agreed with 95% of the mapping. Local terms not mapped to labels were mapped to the domains or classes of the respective terminologies. CONCLUSION: Mapping local vocabularies used by nurses in EHRs to SNTs is a foundational step to making interoperable nursing data available for research and other secondary purposes in large data trusts. This study is the first phase of a larger project building, for the first time, a pipeline to standardize, harmonize, and integrate nursing care plan data from multiple Florida hospitals into the statewide CDRN OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network data trust.