Visualization of Order Set Creation and Usage Patterns in Early Implementation Phases of an Electronic Health Record

Robust order set catalogs are considered to be a vital part of a computerized physician order entry (CPOE) implementation. Tools and processes for building, localizing, and maintaining these content sets in a centralized repository are important in facilitating the knowledge management lifecycle. Collectively, these order sets represent a significant investment of effort and expertise in capturing and distributing best clinical practice throughout an enterprise. In order to address an important gap of understanding how order sets are both created and used in practice in a current EHR installation, we have developed tools to analyze how order sets are used and customized in clinical practice. In this paper, we present the capabilities of these tools. We further characterize early development patterns in our enterprise order set catalog in early phases of a system-wide vendor EHR rollout. We present data that show how personalized order sets (favorites) are authored and then used in clinical practice. We anticipate that this type of utility will provide useful insight and feedback for those tasked with content governance and maintenance in CPOE systems