Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Nov 14, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 14, 2021 - Jan 9, 2022
Date Accepted: Mar 11, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Apr 18, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Exploration of Ambulatory Care Physician Phenotypes for Electronic Health Record Use
ABSTRACT
Background:
Electronic health records (EHRs) have become ubiquitous in United States office-based physician practices. However, the different ways users engage with EHRs remains poorly characterized.
Objective:
The objective of this paper is to explore EHR usage phenotypes amongst ambulatory care physicians.
Methods:
We applied affinity propagation, an unsupervised clustering machine learning technique, to identify EHR user types amongst primary care physicians.
Results:
We identified four distinct clusters generalized across internal medicine, family medicine, and pediatric specialties. Two groups, or phenotype clusters, of physicians with higher-than-average work outside of scheduled hours ratios had varied EHR usage suggesting one group may have worked from home out of necessity while the other preferred ad hoc work hours. From the two remaining groups, one group represented physicians with lower-than-average EHR time. The last group represented physicians who spend the largest proportion of their EHR time documenting notes.
Conclusions:
These findings demonstrate the utility of cluster analysis for exploring EHR phenotypes and may offer opportunities for interventions to improve EHR design and use to better support EHR users’ needs.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.