Mapping Documentation Burden: Analyzing Centrality and Clusters among Flowsheet Measures and Templates Through Network Analysis

This study applied network analysis (NA) to identify documentation burden in nursing flowsheets, quantifying and visualizing the interconnectedness of nursing flowsheet templates and measures. By analyzing centrality metrics and edge weights, we highlighted an outdated flowsheet structure and the need for a modern data structure. Using centrality metrics, we identified key templates and measures contributing to documentation burden, including highly repetitive nodes, central hubs, and intermediary nodes that facilitated communication in the network. Our findings showed that certain templates and measures exhibited consistently high centralities across multiple metrics, indicating opportunities for streamlining documentation structures. We also analyzed the communities in both networks to reveal the functional clusters of template and measure documentation. These insights provided a data-driven approach to understand documentation burden and inform opportunities to optimize documentation structures, particularly with increasing ambient technology integrations.

In AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) Annual Symposium 2025