Enhancing Situation Awareness and Decision Making in Primary Care: Clinicians’ Views

Primary care clinicians face the need to process and interpret an ever-increasing amount of patient data, which challenges their ability to review all relevant information needed to make informed decisions that influence patients' lives. Healthcare professionals report frustration in locating, customising and prioritising data in the electronic health records, which was found to impair their situation awareness and have an impact on decision making and quality of care. Towards eliciting opportunities in enhancing physicians' situation awareness and reducing their cognitive overload, we conducted interviews with eight General Practitioners to explore what important information is required before and during the GP-patient consultation to enhance situation awareness, when is the right time to display this information, what is the desired format and what are the main barriers to gaining situation awareness. The Situation Awareness model was used as a conceptual framework to classify emergent themes. Information visualization has the potential to enhance situation awareness during the clinical consultation.