Optimizing Electronic Health Records Through Readability

Abstract

Medical professionals engage in an enormous and ever-increasing amount of reading in Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which may have adverse impacts on patient care. Personalized readability formats (PRFs) may help to accelerate reading these records, without training, and without adversely affecting comprehension in this critical task. Using History of Present Illness (HPI) reports written by physicians, we investigated how personalized fonts impacted medical text reading speed and comprehension. Crowd-workers without medical training read a set of eighth-grade level passages in six common fonts to determine their fastest and slowest fonts, which were then used to display a set of HPI reports and accompanying comprehension questions. Results showed that PRFs accelerated reading of medical passages by 15% while maintaining comprehension. This finding suggests that individualized information design like PRFs, and specifically font optimization, may be a straightforward way to optimize EHRs through readability. We see a future in which PRFs may help physicians in reading medical information, and look toward future studies investigating PRF impacts on medical professionals’ EHR reading.