Nurse-centered co-design of an electronic health record nursing summary

Abstract

Background: Electronic health record (EHR) nursing summaries have the potential to support nurses in locating and synthesizing patient information. However, nurses’ role-specific perspectives are often excluded in the design of the EHR system. The purpose of this study was to describe nurses’ current use of nursing summaries and vital sign information within them and glean their ideas for design improvements. Methods: This research followed Nielsen and Norman's 4-phased design cycle and focused on the discovery and exploration phases to identify the context of nurses' use of the nursing summary (discovery) and to create prototype design layout using physical materials (exploration). Results: Ten clinical inpatient nurses participated in interviews and co-design activities. Nurses hardly use the nursing summary to overview a comprehensive patient's health status. The current design of a nursing summary lacks comprehensive patient information and contains much irrelevant data. Nurses prefer vital signs to be prominently displayed on the summary screen for easy visibility. Conclusion: Involving nurses in the design process can lead to a nursing summary that better meets their needs.

Keywords

• Data visualization
• Electronic health records
• Nurse
• User-computer interface
• Co-design