Clinical Decision Support (CDS) systems have the potential of significantly improving the quality and efficiency of patient care, but they need to present information in a way that is easily understandable by health care personnel. In the clinical setting, nurses are often tasked with the care of a large number of patients, and in specific scenarios are in charge of independently making care decisions to improve patient comfort and for symptom relief care. We developed a CDS prototype embedded in a nursing hand-off management tool, which provides suggestions to adjust a plan of care based on a patient’s profile. We show how presenting patient data and evidence in different forms (textual, tabular, graphical) has an impact on the efficiency of nurse decision making, and how a nurse’s graphical literacy influences this process.

Index Terms: Electronic Health Records, Clinical Decision Support, User Studies, User-centered Design

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Febretti, A., Sousa V., Lopez K. D., Yao, Y., Johnson, A., Keenan, G. M., Wilkie, D. J., One Size Doesn’t Fit All: The Efficiency of Graphical, Numerical and Textual Clinical Decision Support for Nurses, IEEE VIS 2014 Workshop on Electronic Health Record Data Visualization (EHRVis), Paris, France, November 9th, 2014.