Overcoming obstacles to collecting narrative data from eye care professionals at the point-of-care

Capturing the nuances of clinical observations in an electronic format has been a major challenge in implementing electronic health records. In a formative evaluation study using three different methodologies, we identified that the greatest obstacle to point-of-care data entry for eye care was supporting free text annotation of clinical observations. To overcome this obstacle, we developed an approach that captures an image of a free text entry and associates this image with related data elements in an encounter note. Through simulated patient studies, we observed that this approach successfully supported complex documentation at the point of care by clinicians.