Digital Nudging and its Impact on Healthcare Work: Improving Clinical Documentation with Mobile Applications

Abstract

Good clinical documentation is important for patient safety, communication between healthcare professionals, legal protection, quality assurance, reimbursement, and research. In this study, we conduct a two-phased field study on a mobile application designed to support healthcare professionals in improving clinical documentation directly into Electronic Health Records (EHRs). First, we introduced the application to four hospital wards and conducted interviews, user testing, usability, and user experience testing. Second, we measured the application’s usage over three months and compared it to the three months before implementation. The results show that this mobile application significantly saves time for healthcare professionals and supports their clinical documentation practices. We also evaluate if embedding digital nudging into the design of the mobile application impacts healthcare professionals and their established workflows and routines.