The Next-Generation Electronic Health Record in the ICU: A Focus on User-Technology Interface to Optimize Patient Safety and Quality.

As a knowledge-based field of medicine, critical care medicine has benefited from the use of the electronic health records (EHRs) in daily practice, as intensive care unit (ICU) patients generate thousands of pieces of clinical data each day.1 ICU teams must review, interpret, and take action on these data points when managing multiple patients in a time-constrained environment. The increasing number of available data facts to be processed by ICU clinicians for decision-making surpasses human cognitive capacity. ICU physicians described the current display and representation of patient data in the EHR as suboptimum. Performance dashboards are an information delivery system that display the most important information about performance objectives to ICU directors, allowing them to monitor and manage their ICU performance more effectively. The development of visualization dashboards that monitor ICU performance will still need to adhere to usability principles such as Jakob Nielsen's heuristics. The goal of improving EHR interfaces will directly enhance provider well-being, patient outcomes, and quality of care.