Khairat receives nearly $1.35 million to improve electronic health records for ICU providers

Congratulations to Saif Khairat, PhD, MPH, on being awarded nearly $1.35 million in research grant funding from the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health for his project Improving Providers’ Decision-Making and Reducing Information Overload Using Information Visualization in Electronic Health Records.

On a given day, ICU providers typically spend about 3.3 hours using electronic health records (EHR) and respond to 187 alerts per patient. Over the course of one month they will monitor approximately 2.5 million patient data points. Poor design of EHR can cause providers to miss important patient information, which can impede their decision-making and adversely affect patient safety and quality of care.

Visualization is the science of transforming text into a visual display, and dashboards can be used to visually organize data and hold the potential to reduce information overload. Khairat and his research team will find areas of information overload within EHR and test how displaying patient data on a dashboard will affect ICU providers’ decision-making, efficiency, workload and fatigue.

“Provider fatigue and burnout is directly related to patient safety,” explains Dr. Khairat. “The significant amounts of time spent using electronic health records combined with the poor interface design lead to provider fatigue. In this study, we aim to find ways to reduce information overload and to improve providers’ decision-making processes by representing key patient data in a visually appealing fashion to aid data interpretation and synthesis. This funded project would not have been possible without the significant contributions of the late Jane Sox Distinguished Professor Dr. Diane Berry to whom I am grateful.”

The four-year study will run through January 31, 2025, and will include the team members listed below.

Principal Investigator
Saif Khairat | UNC School of Nursing

National Library of Medicine, Award Number 1R01LM013606-01, Khairat (PI) 5/3/2021–01/31/2025, Funding: $1,347,803, “Improving Providers’ Decision-Making and Reducing Information Overload Using Information Visualization in Electronic Health Records”