The physical attractiveness of electronic physician notes

Though notes in electronic medical record systems (EMRs) have advantages, they are often criticized for their unattractive and unprofessional appearance. We sought to identify notes regarded by physicians as attractive and unattractive and the characteristics of both. We sent a sample of 10 notes representing a variety of common note types to a sample of 70 physicians who are either leaders in UW Medicine or randomly selected note authors and asked them to rank the notes by their physical attractivness. We found their rankings were not random, and notes clustered into those considered most, intermediate, and least attractive. Characteristics of each group are presented. We'll use these results to format EMR notes in a more attractive form-a goal important to our physicians-while preserving important clinical, quality and compliance features that were our original goals in moving to electronic notes.