Paper Number

ICIS2025-1200

Paper Type

Complete

Abstract

To explore how electronic health record (EHR) systems influence clinical decision-making and identify socio-technical factors that affect healthcare professionals’ interaction with these systems. Qualitative focus groups examined informaticians, nurses, physicians, and revenue cycle professionals’ experiences using EHR systems in clinical practice. A constructivist grounded theory approach guided data collection and thematic analysis to generate a model of sociotechnical influences on decision-making. Findings revealed that EHR systems exert significant cognitive and human factor burdens on clinicians, impairing their ability to make timely and effective decisions. Clinicians described usability challenges, increased documentation workload, system navigation challenges, and misalignment between clinical practice and system workflows. Despite widespread adoption driven by federal incentives such as the HITECH Act, these issues persist and limit the potential of EHRs to reduce medical errors and improve patient outcomes. The study highlights the need to better design electronic health record systems to address cognitive load, system usability, and clinical practice-system workflow alignment to optimize EHR-supported decision-making. EHR systems must be properly aligned with the clinical workflow needs instead of the clinical workflow being aligned to fit EHR systems. For EHR systems to effectively support clinical care, their design and implementation must be aligned with the realities of clinical practice and workflow. Forcing clinicians to adapt their workflow to fit the structure of EHR systems can disrupt care delivery and contribute to increasing clinician cognitive load, poor system usability, and decision-making impairment.

Comments

21-Healthcare

Download

Share

COinS
 
Dec 14th, 12:00 AM

Sociotechnical Influences of Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems on Clinical Decision-Making

To explore how electronic health record (EHR) systems influence clinical decision-making and identify socio-technical factors that affect healthcare professionals’ interaction with these systems. Qualitative focus groups examined informaticians, nurses, physicians, and revenue cycle professionals’ experiences using EHR systems in clinical practice. A constructivist grounded theory approach guided data collection and thematic analysis to generate a model of sociotechnical influences on decision-making. Findings revealed that EHR systems exert significant cognitive and human factor burdens on clinicians, impairing their ability to make timely and effective decisions. Clinicians described usability challenges, increased documentation workload, system navigation challenges, and misalignment between clinical practice and system workflows. Despite widespread adoption driven by federal incentives such as the HITECH Act, these issues persist and limit the potential of EHRs to reduce medical errors and improve patient outcomes. The study highlights the need to better design electronic health record systems to address cognitive load, system usability, and clinical practice-system workflow alignment to optimize EHR-supported decision-making. EHR systems must be properly aligned with the clinical workflow needs instead of the clinical workflow being aligned to fit EHR systems. For EHR systems to effectively support clinical care, their design and implementation must be aligned with the realities of clinical practice and workflow. Forcing clinicians to adapt their workflow to fit the structure of EHR systems can disrupt care delivery and contribute to increasing clinician cognitive load, poor system usability, and decision-making impairment.

When commenting on articles, please be friendly, welcoming, respectful and abide by the AIS eLibrary Discussion Thread Code of Conduct posted here.