Western Journal of Emergency Medicine: Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health

Learning Objectives: Our initiative aims to develop an education innovation that contributes to: • Enhancing EHR usability through facilitating the process of placing medical orders. • Decreasing click fatigue while increasing professional satisfaction among emergency medicine residents.

Introduction/Background: Bureaucratic tasks are the leading cause of burnout among emergency medicine physicians. Among those tasks is placing medical orders in the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which is a time-consuming and rigorous process that can lead to click fatigue and increase physician burnout. Therefore, we believe that optimizing the EHR experience for order placement will not only decrease the amount of time spent using the EHR but will also decrease click fatigue and improve overall satisfaction of emergency medicine physicians.

Curricular Design: We designed a PowerPoint educational module for the emergency medicine residents that guides them through the process of creating their own personalized order sets. In this module, we demonstrated the step-by-step process of developing order sets for three of the more common presentations to the ED: chest pain, abdominal pain, and headache. This is a significant, minimal cost method that can be used to facilitate many patient encounters through expediting the placement of workup and management orders. After partaking in the educational module, residents were able to develop their own personalized order sets, which will inevitably reduce the number of clicks.

Impact/Effectiveness: Integration of this module has been successful among the emergency medicine residents and was very well received. The number of clicks saved using the order sets presented in the PowerPoint educational module was eight, six, and fifteen clicks for the chest pain, abdominal pain, and headache order sets, respectively. This educational innovation has high transferability to other institutions that use EHRs. We expect that employing this strategy will decrease the amount of time spent on bureaucratic tasks, decrease click fatigue, and improve the overall wellness of the ED physician. Our long-term plan includes expanding our educational curriculum and utilizing qualitative assessment tools to examine its effectiveness.