Smart Order Sets in Electronic Health Records to Decrease Provider Burden

Abstract

Electronic or Smart Order Sets (SOS) can assist in standardizing care according to established guidelines, which can improve productivity for providers.SOS provides a virtual streamlined process, decreases burnout for providers, and provides for a positive impact on patient outcomes. Despite the benefits of SOS, there has not been a uniform adoption of this technology because of questions arising from its perceived usefulness. The DNP project attempted to create SOS into the existing EHR to decrease provider burdenand improve patient outcomes. The aim was to decrease the amount of time spent by the provider towards EHR charting per patient encounter. The PDSA methodology was instrumental in enabling repetitive cycles of change to customize the order sets per the provider’s preferences. The results indicated that while SOS could savetime in charting, it remained difficultto determine the exact number of minutes saved with each patient encounter consistently, due to various reasons such as charting not completed in the student’s presence, or patients not showingup for appointments, which affected the functional ability to test SOS.The provider provided qualitative feedback which suggested increased satisfaction with the created SOS, ease of finding orders, and improved continuity of care among providers. SOS helped integrate evidenced-based clinical guidelines into order sets, boosted organizational efficiency, created organizational uniformity,and delivered the best outcomes in care. Standardized SOS helped providers allocate saved time towards responding to patient queries in a timely manner, and improved patient-provider relations by increasingproductivity and endorseda component of joy among providers.