Keywords
electronic health records and systems - clinical decision support - data visualization
- ambulatory care/primary care - cognition
Background and Significance
Background and Significance
Primary care clinicians often make care decisions under significant time constraints,[1]
[2] and in environments characterized by missing, scattered, erroneous, and conflicting
information.[3] Increasingly, clinical decision support systems help clinicians make sense of this
information chaos by executing rules that focus attention on recommended tests or
treatments.[4]
[5]
[6] Yet, for many common clinical decisions, clearly applicable clinical guidelines
are not available to guide decision making. For example, patients may have multiple
chronic conditions, conditions with unclear diagnoses, or psychosocial complications
for which existing guidelines do not apply.[7]
[8] Moreover, clinicians may have tried guideline-based treatments in the past without
improvement in patient outcomes, and thus are left searching for other treatment options.[9]
Patients with chronic pain are especially challenging cases for consistently delivering
high-quality care. These patients often have multiple mental or physical health comorbidities.
Moreover, today, the United States remains in the midst of an opioid crisis involving
misuse, substance use disorder, and opioid overdose. In apparent response to this
crisis, opioid prescribing for chronic noncancer pain has begun to decrease in recent
years.[10]
[11] Yet, millions of patients still suffer from chronic pain. Thus, their health care
providers require high-quality information and usable tools to help them efficiently
choose the best treatments for improving their patients' pain and overall well-being.[9] For complex conditions like chronic pain, electronic health records (EHRs) often
contain large amounts of relevant historical patient data that a clinician may find
useful in treating patients.[12] In such complex decision-making contexts, clinicians may benefit from patient information
displays that help them organize and make sense of large amounts of patient information
on past and current treatments, outcomes, and new treatment options.[3]
[13]
Researchers have applied information visualization techniques in various ways to support
understanding individual patients, populations of patients, and data over time.[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
[18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22]
[23]
[24] When attempting to understand individual patients, clinicians often need to quickly
identify events before, after, or during a particular point in time and then focus
on the details of important events.[16]
[25] For example, in trying to identify a treatment for a patient suffering from an acute
exacerbation of chronic low back pain, clinicians may benefit from visualizations
that help them quickly identify what treatments have been tried in the past and whether
painful symptoms subsided alongside those treatments.[26]
[27] Having identified a time in the patient's history where pain was well managed, the
clinician may then be interested in drilling down to more detailed information on
the events, treatments, and outcomes surrounding that point in time. Prior visualization
approaches often focus on making sense of patterns in patient data, with limited actionable
guidance to clinicians. Yet, providing actionable guidance is a fundamental criterion
for successful adoption of decision support.[4]
[28]
[29] Thus, in today's world, where EHRs are widely used, but clinicians, vendors, and
researchers have concerns about usability and utility,[16]
[30]
[31] new visual information displays are needed that allow clinicians to explore longitudinal
data about their patients, and provide actionable clinical decision-making guidance.
These displays should be designed with an understanding of clinicians' day-to-day
information needs.
Objective
The objective of this article is to describe a decision-centered design process, and
resultant interactive patient information displays, to support key decision requirements
in chronic pain care.[32] We identified, and designed the information displays to support, four key decision
requirements: (1) the need to understand current and past treatment plans (particularly
medications), (2) the need to identify treatment options, (3) the need to identify
trends and changes in patient condition, and (4) the need to assess risk of opioid
misuse. Primary care clinicians typically care for many patients with chronic pain,
often have limited training in chronic pain treatment, and report low satisfaction
in delivering chronic pain care.[33]
[34]
[35]
[36]
[37] Moreover, because patients may have longstanding pain conditions with unclear diagnoses
and/or comorbid conditions that complicate treatment choices, clinicians may benefit
from visual displays that allow them to review and understand historical treatments
and outcomes in the context of possible new treatment options they may order.[38]
[39] Based on our understanding of clinical information availability and use, perceptions,
judgments, and decisions during primary care visits for chronic pain, we iteratively
designed a novel patient data visualization, the Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker, to
support clinicians in reviewing current and past treatments and choosing appropriate
new treatments for pain. We hope that in sharing this novel design concept, we will
inspire others to adapt and extend this approach in other contexts.
Methods
Overview
We designed the Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker in three stages (see [Fig. 1]). First, we conducted critical decision method interviews[40] with adult primary care clinicians who care for patients with chronic noncancer
pain. These interviews and subsequent analysis produced key clinical decision requirements
related to chronic pain care. Second, we conducted a half-day multidisciplinary design
workshop based on these decision requirements. Through group ideation, discussion,
and sketching, the workshop produced a list of information needs that supported the
decision requirements and design seeds[41] for patient information visualizations to support chronic pain care. We conceptualized
design seeds as approaches to organizing information, visually displaying information,
or navigating between information elements.[32] Third, we designed an interactive prototype based on the design seeds and information
needs. We will briefly describe the first two stages of the design process. However,
they are described in more detail in previously published papers.[32]
[42] This article will detail, and present the results of, the third stage of the design
process, the visual design of the prototype Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker.
Fig. 1 Stages of design used to create the Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker.
Critical Decision Method Interviews
We recruited 10 adult primary care clinicians who currently treat the chronic noncancer
pain conditions of at least 5 patients. Participating clinicians worked in four clinics
that span rural, suburban, and urban areas in the United States. Nine of the 10 clinicians
were physicians, while the 10th was a nurse practitioner. The clinicians were 50%
male, with an average age of 48 years, and an average of 15 years in practice. We
recruited clinicians by e-mail, phone, and in-person presentations to clinic-wide
physician meetings. Each clinician in the sample completed three interviews, each
occurring within 3 days of a visit by a patient with chronic noncancer pain. Clinicians
were compensated up to $500 for their time. Clinicians provided written informed consent
before participating. Each interview lasted approximately 60 minutes and was audio
recorded and transcribed. Each clinician's first interview included general questions
about their patient population and approach to chronic pain treatment, including tools
or aids they use when delivering care. The remainder of the interview (and subsequent
interviews) used an adapted critical decision method interview technique,[40] in which clinicians recalled a recent patient visit and cocreated, with the interviewer,
a timeline of key events in the patient's care history. The interviewer then asked
probing questions to understand the clinicians' information needs, actions, goals,
and decision-making strategies around these key events.
We qualitatively analyzed the interview transcripts to identify key decision requirements
for clinical decision support. For the purposes of this study, we conceptualized decision
requirements as challenging decision-making tasks and/or cognitive demands that clinicians
encountered when managing chronic noncancer pain. First, eight researchers on the
team independently reviewed the same two transcripts and identified topics of interest.
This set of topics was compiled into a draft codebook, and four researchers refined
the codebook through an iterative process of coding using the draft codebook, discussion,
and consensus. Once the codebook was finalized, each transcript was coded individually
by two researchers who then met and reached consensus on all codes. After judging
that thematic saturation had been reached, we analyzed the coded data to extract higher-level
concepts (i.e., decision requirements) from the coded data.
Multidisciplinary Design Workshop
We conducted a half-day design workshop to expand on the decision requirements by
identifying associated information needs and design seeds. We conceptualized information
needs as information that supports clinical decision requirements (e.g., information
that aids in assessment, diagnosis, or treatment of pain). There were 14 total participants
in the workshop, including 9 researchers from the project team, with expertise in
informatics, human factors, behavioral science, engineering, and medicine. Of three
physicians on the research team, two were primary care specialists and one was a pain
specialist. Additional workshop participants included five primary care physicians,
four of whom had also participated in the critical decision method interviews. Sixty
percent of these additional workshop participants were female, with an average age
of 43 years. All five of the additional workshop participants had Doctor of Medicine
degrees, and had years of experience ranging from 10 to 26 years with an average of
15 years in practice. After being introduced to the decision requirements, participants
worked in teams of three to five multidisciplinary members and rapidly sketched low-fidelity
prototypes of patient information visualizations to support the requirements. Each
small group had at least two members from the project team and at least one nonresearcher
participant. Each small group presented their prototypes to the larger group for feedback
and discussion before reconvening for additional refinement. Discussion focused on
design concepts as well as the underlying intent and rationale. Following the workshop,
two researchers thematically analyzed notes, video recordings, and the prototype designs
generated during the workshop. Through this process they coded the content, analyzed
the codes for commonalities and differences, and ultimately arrived at a list of information
needs and design seeds through consensus.
The abovementioned interview, thematic analysis, full set of key decision requirements,
and design workshop are described in more depth elsewhere.[32]
[42]
Prototype Design
The Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker was iteratively designed specifically to support
four identified decision requirements, and the associated information needs and design
seeds ([Table 1]). The prototypes were developed by a research team member who is a user experience
designer with a human factors background and 15 years' experience designing prototypes
and conducting user testing on a range of interfaces, including EHRs and clinical
decision support. The designer participated in the qualitative analysis of the clinician
interviews and the design workshop, and therefore had a deep understanding of the
decision requirements and information needs. In addition, the designer's knowledge
of clinical workflow and EHR use was informed by previous research and design projects
including studies evaluating clinical decision support for medication therapy management,[43] designing a prototype for consult management for the Veteran's Health Administration,[44] and evaluating a modular decision support application for colorectal cancer screening.[45] Exploratory concepts started as sketches with pencil and paper. These concepts were
brought to the larger research team for feedback. Designs were refined based on several
rounds of feedback. Often, new design ideas were generated during the feedback sessions
and incorporated into the designs. As the design concepts matured, they were built
into prototypes using Axure, a prototyping tool.[46]
Table 1
Focal decision requirements and associated information needs and design seeds[32]
|
Decision requirement (DR) supported by this design
|
Information needs associated with the DR
|
Design seeds associated with the DR
|
|
1. Understand current and past treatment plans (particularly medications)
|
• Current medications
• Past medications
|
• Present key information aggregated and organized in a single view
• Organize information in tables
|
|
2. Identify treatment options
|
• Effectiveness of treatments for this patient
• Treatments that have been tried in the past and reasons for discontinuing
|
• Use visual cues to focus attention on treatment options not yet tried
|
|
3. Identify trends and changes in patient condition
|
• Pain medication use over time
• Patient outcomes (e.g., pain and function) over time
|
• Use time-based displays to depict trends and highlight anomalies
• Provide interactive drill-down capability for relevant details
|
|
4. Assess risk of opioid misuse or abuse
|
• Urine drug screen results
• Opioid-related risk assessments
• Opioid treatment agreement
• Prescription drug monitoring program report information
|
• Create tools to help summarize opioid-related risks
|
In the design process, the Gestalt principles of similarity, proximity, and common
region were leveraged to group information that decision makers process together.
For example, in our designs, current treatments are grouped together and separate
from past treatments and possible future treatments. Consistent with best design practices,
the design process incorporated color as a redundant cue to tie display elements together,[47] aimed to include no more than five or six colors in a display,[48] and used appropriate size fonts (i.e., 12 point) for viewing screens from standard
distances.[49] General usability principles (e.g., items are grouped into logical zones and headings
are used to distinguish between zones) and information visualization principles (e.g.,
information follows a logical organization) were considered during the design process.[50]
Results
The resulting Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker ([Fig. 2]) is an exploratory prototype that supports users in understanding current and past
treatment plans (decision requirement 1), and in identifying treatment options (decision
requirement 2). At-a-glance, it presents key information in a single view, thereby
aligning with one of the design seeds. The Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker goes beyond
traditional medication lists to display the whole treatment plan, including nonmedication
treatments. Treatments are organized by six types: (1) oral medications; (2) topical
medications; (3) referrals; (4) interventions such as surgery, injections, medical
equipment, or Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation therapy; (5) integrative medicine
such as meditation; and (6) lifestyle changes such as exercise and nutrition. We organized
the treatments by type to highlight the different modalities of treatment that are
available. By doing this, clinicians can easily identify where holes in the treatment
plan may exist. The data displayed in the prototype is based on a patient use case
from an interview with a participant clinician. Additional details were added from
the clinicians on our research team, based on typical patients they encounter who
have chronic pain.
Fig. 2 Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker.
Current treatments are listed at the top of the display with the following basic information:
-
the name of the treatment,
-
the condition for which it is being used,
-
the dose, quantity, and frequency for medications,
-
appointment progress for referrals, and
-
an area for clinicians to leave notes.
This last area is important, because it provides clinicians with a flexible space
for leaving important reminders, notes to others, or comments on treatment progress.
Too often, EHR documentation interfaces are rigid, constraining the form and type
of information that can be recorded. Dropdown menus and radio buttons may force clinicians
to choose options that do not fit, resulting in documentation that is incomplete or
inaccurate. Providing clinicians with space for additional notes is one way to address
this problem.
Past treatments are displayed in their own list below the current treatments. Past treatments are
often difficult to find in the medical record if they have been removed from (or were
never included in) the standard medication list. The past treatment list provides
an easy way for clinicians to understand what treatments have been tried in the past
without foraging through notes or relying on patient recall. For each past treatment,
basic information is presented, including:
-
the name of the treatment,
-
the condition for which it is being used,
-
the date it was last ordered, and
-
the reason it was discontinued.
The reason for discontinuation is important to clinicians as they consider what treatments
to explore next. Treatments may be discontinued for various reasons such as ineffectiveness,
allergies, contraindications, insurance constraints, or patient preference.
Possible future treatments are highlighted on the right side of the display to aid clinicians in identifying
potential treatment options. In this case, recommendations were generated by the clinicians
on our research team based on the clinical case that was used to populate our design
with content. In the discussion section, we describe other ways recommendations could
be generated.
Treatments to be cautious about are listed in the bottom right side of the display. The caution list highlights potentially
risky treatments at the point in time when clinicians need it most—as they are making
decisions about what treatments to try next. The caution list has the potential to
avoid disruptions in the ordering process stemming from issues such as contraindications,
allergies, and drug–drug interactions.
Additional details about each treatment can be accessed by clicking on the treatment,
which triggers a modal view. See [Fig. 3] for an overview of the four types of modal views.
Fig. 3 Overview of modal views.
The current treatment modal view allows clinicians to access additional details about each current treatment. To help
identify trends in treatment history, pain, and function (decision requirement 3),
it features a notional time-based display. To facilitate risk assessment of opioid
treatments (decision requirement 4), it presents summary information for prescription
drug monitoring data, urine drug screen results, and treatment agreement contracts.
To support an understanding of the current treatment plan (decision requirement 1),
it presents excerpts from progress notes pertaining to the current treatment. Identifying
relevant notes is a process that is cumbersome today. Clinicians must guess which
notes contain the information for which they are looking, resulting in tedious searching,
clicking, opening, scanning, and closing as they try to find the right note. This
feature aims to reduce that burden.
The past treatment modal view allows clinicians to access additional information about each past treatment. Similar
to the current treatment modal view, it includes a notional time-based display for
treatment history and links to relevant notes. It also includes clinician comments
about treatment effectiveness and links to relevant tests and imaging. This view primarily
supports clinicians' requirement to understand past treatments (decision requirement
1) and identify treatment options (decision requirement 2).
The possible future treatment modal view allows clinicians to access additional decision support for each potential treatment
option (decision requirement 2). Examples of information that could be included in
this view include:
-
Ease for patient (e.g., proximity, cost).
-
Highlights from drug resources, including a link for more information.
-
Contact information for referrals.
-
Previous patient experience (if any) with each treatment.
-
Links to patient education materials.
-
A description explaining why the treatment was recommended.
-
A link to order.
The caution modal view allows clinicians to access additional details about treatments that should be avoided
or approached with caution. Specifically, it provides an explanation about why a treatment
has been identified as risky. The explanation promotes transparency in the system
and encourages providers to make their own judgments regarding which treatments should
be avoided. The information provided in this view also supports providers in the task
of identifying treatment options by eliminating potentially problematic options (decision
requirement 2).
Discussion
In this study, we applied a decision-centered design approach with iterative user-centered
design methods and rich data from clinicians to produce an interactive visual patient
interface to support care for individual patients with chronic pain.[10]
[11]
[38]
[39]
[51] As the volume and variety of data contained in EHRs continues to grow, clinicians
increasingly need well-designed, visual-based tools to help them navigate a patient's
history, sift through relevant contextual information, and identify the most promising
treatments. This is particularly true in the case of complex and prevalent chronic
conditions, like chronic pain, diabetes, and substance use disorder. The prototype
tool we developed and present here offers a promising approach for providing such
clinical decision support.
Our multistage design process led to novel patient information displays with potential
for future implementation and evaluation. Increasingly, EHRs support integrated third-party
applications that use standardized communication interfaces[52]
[53] and thus allow for novel designs to be presented within a clinician's normal EHR
system environment. This helps reduce time burden, loss of context, and data sharing
associated with switching between an EHR and a nonintegrated clinical decision support
application. Therefore, the designs presented here, as well as other designs that
reflect the decision requirements we identified, could be developed independently
and integrated in EHRs.
This study has several strengths and some limitations. We applied a rigorous and iterative
process of engaging clinicians, researchers, and designers in codesigning interfaces
that could be more usable and useful to clinicians than most current EHR information
displays. However, the anticipated users of our designs are primary care clinicians
that work in community and academic health systems in the United States, and our data
came from clinicians in only four clinics across two health systems, so we are aware
that our designs may not reflect the unique requirements and needs of some clinicians.
Still, we focused our design on a particularly prevalent and costly health care challenge
in chronic pain.[54] Therefore, if implemented, our designs have the potential to positively impact many
patients and providers. With that said, the focus on chronic pain may limit the generalizability
of our findings and designs to other conditions.
Finally, our study is limited by the fact that we did not implement the Chronic Pain
Treatment Tracker with clinicians or patients. Given known challenges in EHR data
completeness, accuracy, and standardization,[55]
[56]
[57] implementing the Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker with real-world patient data will
require overcoming several such challenges. First, clinicians consistently noted the
need for context in patient evaluations and clinical decision making, including understanding
the rationale behind various treatments or their discontinuation. In EHRs, this information
is best found in text-based clinical notes, which are difficult to incorporate into
tools like the Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker due to their unstructured nature. One
way to address this may be via natural language processing to identify and extract
useful clinical context from notes. Additionally, populating tools like the Chronic
Pain Treatment Tracker requires data from numerous areas in the EHR. For example,
medication order data are stored separately from data capturing orders for referrals
like physical therapy. As a result, the technical pipeline for populating each data
element must be constructed individually, an arduous implementation task. To overcome
this challenge, systems could build discrete data elements dedicated to Chronic Pain
Treatment Tracker functionality. This would allow for technical segmentation between
the process by which these discrete data elements are populated and the process by
which they are retrieved for viewing in the Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker. This approach
has the potential to make retrieval more uniform across data elements. The source
of the recommended “Possible Future” treatments would also need to be addressed in
implementation, as the mechanism for deriving this list has not been created. In implementation,
such a mechanism could be as simple as a list of common treatments not previously
tried, a more complex set of decision roles, or even a predictive model based on outcomes.
As the designs transition to software development, we will continue to iterate with
a focus on a broader range of patient data, practical constraints of the EHR, and
additional user feedback.
At the time of this writing, we are in the process of evaluating the Chronic Pain
Treatment Tracker. While initial feedback looks promising, we cannot yet report if
these designs would be perceived as usable or adoptable, or positively impact care
quality. Still, this article describes a rigorously developed design and vision for
a visual patient information interface that could go far beyond typical EHR displays
to provide clinicians with information they need to make high-quality patient care
decisions.
Based on both the strengths and limitations of this study, there are several potential
future studies. As mentioned above, because EHR systems increasingly support standardized
application programming interfaces to allow for third-party app integration, future
work may involve development and integration of the Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker
with real-world EHR data and systems. This would then allow for pragmatic studies
of the tool's impact on decision making and patient outcomes embedded in the environment
of use.
Conclusion
The goal of this study was to apply a rigorous design strategy to develop a tool to
facilitate clinical sensemaking for a challenging chronic condition. Driven by a decision-centered
design approach, we focused on supporting the most difficult decisions and demands
clinicians face when treating patients with chronic pain, including understanding
the current treatment plan, identifying suitable treatment options, identifying trends,
and assessing opioid-related risks. Given the complexities of pain and a digital environment
characterized by missing, scattered, erroneous, and conflicting information, these
challenges can be formidable. We aimed to design a tool that could help clinicians
organize and make sense of the information available to them. The resulting prototype,
the Chronic Pain Treatment Tracker, is a novel approach to decision support because
it focuses less on algorithmic-based guidelines that are pushed to providers, and
more on sensemaking. That is, the tool presents clinicians with the information they
need in a structure that promotes quick uptake, understanding, and action.
Clinical Relevance Statement
Clinical Relevance Statement
These findings help health care administrators, electronic medical record developers,
and health care providers identify critical information required for decision making
in chronic pain care delivery. These findings also provide a launching point for future
development of decision support tools beyond chronic pain care and the design elements
to include for succinct communication and sensemaking.
Multiple Choice Questions
Multiple Choice Questions
-
Primary care providers require which of the following information to making treatment
decisions for patients with chronic pain?
-
Quickly understand current and past treatment plans (particularly medications).
-
Identify treatment options and assess risks of opioid misuse and abuse.
-
Identify trends and changes in patient condition.
-
All the above.
Correct Answer: The correct answer is option d because each of the components from a, b, and c are
considered critical information primary care providers use when making a treatment
decision. Providers need to have an understanding of the prior and current treatments
used as to identify what remaining treatment options are available in the current
visit. Providers need to know what future treatment options are available for this
particular patient. The provider also needs to know whether this patient has any risks
related to opioids. Lastly, providers need to know how pain management has progressed
overtime and assess the patient's pain and function.
-
The primary objective of this study was to:
-
Identify critical treatment information for primary care providers and their patients
with chronic pain.
-
Design a succinct display for primary care providers to review pertinent information
and support treatment of multiple chronic conditions, including pain, diabetes, and
hypertension.
-
Describe the iterative design process used and visual displays developed to support
decision making for clinicians caring for patients with chronic pain.
-
Develop visualization tools for population health professionals interested in assessing
population risk among a cohort of patients with chronic pain.
Correct Answer: The correct answer is option c. The focus of this article is to present the process
and resultant visual designs for pain decision support in primary care. The purpose
was not to design a more general tool that addressed other conditions, to identify
treatment information generally, nor to address population health needs.