Reasons (not) to Spend a Few Billions More on EHRs: How Human Factors Research Can Help

To select best medical informatics research works published in 2013 on electronic health record (EHR) adoption, design, and impact, from the perspective of human factors and organizational issues (HFOI).

We selected 2,764 papers by querying PubMed (Mesh and TIAB) as well as using a manual search. Papers were evaluated based on pre-defined exclusion and inclusion criteria from their title, keywords, and abstract to select 15 candidate best papers, finally reviewed by 4 external reviewers using a standard evaluation grid.

Five papers were selected as best papers to illustrate how human factors approaches can improve EHR adoption and design. Among other contributions, these works: (i) make use of the observational and analysis methodologies of social and cognitive sciences to understand clinicians' attitudes towards EHRs, EHR use patterns, and impact on care processes, workflows, information exchange, and coordination of care; (ii) take into account macro- (environmental) and meso- (organizational) level factors to analyze EHR adoption or lack thereof; (iii) highlight the need for qualitative studies to analyze the unexpected side effects of EHRs on cognitive and work processes as well as the persistent use of paper.

Selected papers tend to demonstrate that HFOI approaches and methodologies are essential to bridge the gap between EHR systems and end users, and to reduce regularly reported adoption failures and unexpected consequences.