Man vs machine in emergency medicine - a study on the effects of manual and automatic vital sign documentation on data quality and perceived workload, using observational paired sample data and questionnaires

Emergency medicine is characterized by a high patient flow where timely decisions are essential. Clinical decision support systems have the potential to assist in such decisions but will be dependent on the data quality in electronic health records which often is inadequate. This study explores the effect of automated documentation of vital signs on data quality and workload. An observational study of 200 vital sign measurements was performed to evaluate the effects of manual vs automatic documentation on data quality. Data collection using questionnaires was performed to compare the workload on wards using manual or automatic documentation. In the automated documentation time to documentation was reduced by 6.1 min (0.6 min vs 7.7 min, p