Contribution of Free-Text Comments to the Burden of Documentation: Assessment and Analysis of Vital Sign Comments in Flowsheets

Background: Documentation burden is a common problem with modern electronic health record (EHR) systems. To reduce this burden, various recording methods (eg, voice recorders or motion sensors) have been proposed. However, these solutions are in an early prototype phase and are unlikely to transition into practice in the near future. A more pragmatic alternative is to directly modify the implementation of the existing functionalities of an EHR system. Objective: This study aims to assess the nature of free-text comments entered into EHR flowsheets that supplement quantitative vital sign values and examine opportunities to simplify functionality and reduce documentation burden. Methods: We evaluated 209,055 vital sign comments in flowsheets that were generated in the Epic EHR system at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2018. We applied topic modeling, as well as the natural language processing Clinical Language Annotation, Modeling, and Processing software system, to extract generally discussed topics and detailed medical terms (expressed as probability distribution) to investigate the stories communicated in these comments. Results: Our analysis showed that 63.33% (6053/9557) of the users who entered vital signs made at least one free-text comment in vital sign flowsheet entries. The user roles that were most likely to compose comments were registered nurse, technician, and licensed nurse. The most frequently identified topics were the notification of a result to health care providers (0.347), the context of a measurement (0.307), and an inability to obtain a vital sign (0.224). There were 4187 unique medical terms that were extracted from 46,029 (0.220) comments, including many symptom-related terms such as "pain," "upset," "dizziness," "coughing," "anxiety," "distress," and "fever" and drug-related terms such as "tylenol," "anesthesia," "cannula," "oxygen," "motrin," "rituxan," and "labetalol." Conclusions: Considering that flowsheet comments are generally not displayed or automatically pulled into any clinical notes, our findings suggest that the flowsheet comment functionality can be simplified (eg, via structured response fields instead of a text input dialog) to reduce health care provider effort. Moreover, rich and clinically important medical terms such as medications and symptoms should be explicitly recorded in clinical notes for better visibility.