Impact of Data Entry Interface Design on Cognitive Workload, Documentation Correctness, and Documentation Efficiency

Clinical documentation serves as the legal record of patient care and used to guide clinical decision making. Inadequately designed data entry user-interfaces may result in unintended consequences that negatively impact patient safety and outcomes because inaccurate information is used to guide clinical decision making. This study utilized an electronic simulated documentation interface (i.e., artificial electronic health record) combined with eye-tracking hardware to analyze documentation correctness, documentation efficiency, and cognitive workload of anesthesia providers (N = 20) generating documentation using different computer-assisted data entry types (drop-down box, radio button, check-box, and free text with autocomplete suggestions). Our study methodology incorporating eye-tracking with electronic health record user interfaces to assess documentation correctness, efficiency, and cognitive workload can be translated to other health care provider types.