Electronic Progress Note Reading Patterns: An Eye Tracking Analysis.

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Electronic health records are crucial in modern healthcare.
• Understanding physician interaction with electronic progress notes is vital for optimizing usability.
• Physician note-reading behaviors can impact patient care and information retrieval.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how the arrangement of sections within electronic progress notes affects physician reading patterns.
• To analyze the relationship between visual attention during note review and subsequent information recall.

Main Methods:

• Utilized eye-tracking technology with seven physician participants.
• Physicians reviewed electronic progress notes for four distinct patient cases.
• Collected and analyzed eye-tracking data alongside verbal summaries of the notes.

Main Results:

• Observed significant variability in how physicians read and processed note sections.
• No correlation was found between the duration of time spent viewing a specific section and the inclusion of that section's information in the verbal summary.
• Reading behaviors did not consistently align with the origin or order of note sections.

Conclusions:

• The sequential order of information in electronic progress notes may not be the primary determinant of physician comprehension or recall.
• Physician information-seeking strategies during note review are diverse and complex.
• Further research is needed to identify factors influencing effective information extraction from electronic health records.