A Statistical Approach for the Learning Curve of Physicians in Utilization of Electronic Order Sets.

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.