ArticleApplied clinical informatics2014
What do physicians read (and ignore) in electronic progress notes?
Article in Applied clinical informatics, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Clinicians' reasoning as reflected in electronic clinical note-entry and reading/retrieval: a systematic review and qualitative synthesis.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2019Pooled it
- Effect of Outpatient Note Templates on Note Quality: NOTE (Notation Optimization through Template Engineering) Randomized Clinical Trial.Journal of general internal medicine · 2021Trial
- An electronic documentation system improves the quality of admission notes: a randomized trial.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2017Trial
- Clinical sentiment analysis of ICU notes: a dataset and a comparison of lexicon and clinical language model methods.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2026Article
- Clinicians' Visual Attention During Suicide Screening Encounters: An Exploratory Eye-Tracking Study.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Association of documented high blood pressure measurements with time to hypertension diagnosis.The American journal of medicine · 2026Article
- LabVis: usability testing of a prototype tool for integrating timeline graphs and clinical notes.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2025Article
- Information Prioritization and Reading Patterns in Electronic Health Record Nursing Summaries: An Eye-Tracking Case Study.Applied clinical informatics · 2025Article
- Leveraging Medical Knowledge Graphs Into Large Language Models for Diagnosis Prediction: Design and Application Study.JMIR AI · 2025Article
- Assessing user perspectives on clinical pharmacogenomics consultation documentation: a user-centered evaluation.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2024Article
- Comparison of medical documentation between pharmacist-led anticoagulation clinics and physician-led anticoagulation clinics: A retrospective study.Saudi pharmaceutical journal : SPJ : the official publication of the Saudi Pharmaceutical Society · 2023Article
- Time to Put Down the Phone-A Case for Structured Data Entry.JCO clinical cancer informatics · 2023Article
- Overview of the Problem List Summarization (ProbSum) 2023 Shared Task on Summarizing Patients' Active Diagnoses and Problems from Electronic Health Record Progress Notes.Proceedings of the conference. Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting · 2023Article
- Progress Note Understanding - Assessment and Plan Reasoning: Overview of the 2022 N2C2 Track 3 shared task.Journal of biomedical informatics · 2023Article
- DR.BENCH: Diagnostic Reasoning Benchmark for Clinical Natural Language Processing.Journal of biomedical informatics · 2023Article
- I had not time to make it shorter: an exploratory analysis of how physicians reduce note length and time in notes.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2023Article
- Summarizing Patients' Problems from Hospital Progress Notes Using Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Models.Proceedings of COLING. International Conference on Computational Linguistics · 2022Article
- Hierarchical Annotation for Building A Suite of Clinical Natural Language Processing Tasks: Progress Note Understanding.LREC ... International Conference on Language Resources & Evaluation : [proceedings]. International Conference on Language Resources & Evaluation · 2022Article
- Rise of the Machines: The Inevitable Evolution of Medicine and Medical Laboratories Intertwining with Artificial Intelligence-A Narrative Review.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Using nursing notes to improve clinical outcome prediction in intensive care patients: A retrospective cohort study.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveSeveral studies have documented the preference for physicians to attend to the impression and plan section of a clinical document. However, it is not clear how much attention other sections of a document receive. The goal of this study was to identify how physicians distribute their visual attention while reading electronic notes.
methodsWe used an eye-tracking device to assess the visual attention patterns of ten hospitalists as they read three electronic notes. The assessment included time spent reading specific sections of a note as well as rates of reading. This visual analysis was compared with the content of simulated verbal handoffs for each note and debriefing interviews.
resultsStudy participants spent the most time in the "Impression and Plan" section of electronic notes and read this section very slowly. Sections such as the "Medication Profile", "Vital Signs" and "Laboratory Results" received less attention and were read very quickly even if they contained more content than the impression and plan. Only 9% of the content of physicians' verbal handoff was found outside of the "Impression and Plan."
conclusionPhysicians in this study directed very little attention to medication lists, vital signs or laboratory results compared with the impression and plan section of electronic notes. Optimizing the design of electronic notes may include rethinking the amount and format of imported patient data as this data appears to largely be ignored.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.