Abstract
Background Understanding a physician's behavior toward learning order sets is important as it
is a key information to design order sets with optimized contents.
Objective The objective of this article is to test a hypothesis: for a physician using a new
order set repeatedly, the utilization rate of order set contents has a pattern of
either increase or decrease.
Methods To test the hypothesis, we retrieved empirical data of order set usage in local hospitals
that adopted a new computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system and enterprise
wide standard order sets. We extracted 4-year data including 63,583 orders made by
600 physicians in the inpatient setting and analyzed patterns of the learning curve
at several aggregation levels.
Result The analysis results demonstrated that content modification rates over time were
relatively flat except for a few localized patterns.
Conclusion Based on our finding, we reject our initial hypothesis.
Keywords
order set - computerized physician order entry - learning curve - electronic health
record
