Visualizing collaborative electronic health record usage for hospitalized patients with heart failure

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Network Science
• Clinical Collaboration

Background:

• Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are central to modern healthcare.
• Understanding provider interactions within EHR systems is crucial for care coordination.
• Heart failure patient care involves multidisciplinary teams.

Purpose of the Study:

• To visualize and describe collaborative electronic health record (EHR) usage for hospitalized heart failure patients.
• To analyze the network of healthcare provider interactions based on EHR access.

Main Methods:

• Identified heart failure patient records and associated healthcare provider EHR usage.
• Constructed a provider-patient interaction network and a provider collaboration network.
• Calculated network statistics, including modularity and provider cliques.

Main Results:

• 5113 healthcare providers accessed 548 heart failure patient records in 2012.
• The provider collaboration network comprised 1504 nodes and 83,998 edges.
• Identified 7 major collaboration modules with an average clique size of 87.9 providers.

Conclusions:

• A large number of diverse healthcare providers access heart failure patient EHRs.
• Shared EHR access occurs in both pairwise and large group interactions.
• Network analysis highlights extensive multidisciplinary record access for heart failure patients, suggesting potential for improved care coordination.