Background: Electronic health record (EHR) systems are used by a majority of US hospitals. EHR use has been associated with increased task complexity, clinical data volume and provider documentation demands. Studies of multiple specialties suggest that a significant amount of provider time is spent on indirect patient care activities including turbulent provider workflows and documentation. [...]

Background: Inpatient physicians often spend 30-60 minutes daily creating a “rounding list,” a process that requires reviewing the electronic health record (EHR) and transcribing data to paper. Previous studies have described automated rounding-lists leveraging EHR data showing improved clinician satisfaction, decreased daily chart review time, and improved accuracy of information. However, previous rounding lists were [...]

Background: Accurate, high-quality data is critical for work in quality improvement, research, and clinical operations. With an electronic health record (EHR), vast amounts of observational data are collected on patients every day. This data can provide actionable knowledge if an institution can successfully extract and analyze it. At our institution, which adopted the Epic EHR [...]

Background: Medication alerts are one of the touted safety features with the electronic health record (EHR). With time, users tend to override the alerts, which leads to patient harm. The phenomenon of “alert fatigue” is well known to any practicing clinician. Frequent interruptions of little value train physicians to disregard alerts in favor of efficiency. [...]

Background: Healthcare research has traditionally relied upon data collected from clinical trials and data generated from patient registries and insurance claims to drive analyses. As electronic health records (EHR) and computerized physician order entry have proliferated, large quantities of healthcare data is being generated daily through their routine use. A form of “big data,” this [...]