How Do Healthcare Professionals Personalize Their Software? A Pilot Exploration Based on an Electronic Health Records Search Engine

To improve user experience, many health IT systems provide personalization options allowing end users to tailor the software to their needs and preferences. However, few studies have investigated if healthcare professionals actually make full use of this feature. As an initial step towards understanding end users' software personalization behavior in healthcare, we conducted a pilot study to examine how clinicians, staff and researchers customized a search engine designed to facilitate information retrieval from electronic health records. The results show that a majority of the end users (82.4%) did not make an effort to modem the system's default settings. Among those who did, they more often changed its 'look-and-feel' than its functionality offerings. We conclude that future research is warranted to study the rationale underlying healthcare professionals' software personalization decisions both to optimize user experience and to avoid building complex and costly personalization options that are unused or underutilized.