Abstract. Electronic health record (EHR) systems are essential for healthcare management and have likewise faced ambiguities concerning clinical responsibility because of their standardized templates. This paper examines how EHR templates influence clinicians’ autonomy in interdisciplinary documentation. By utilizing focus groups and individual interviews with EHR users in Norway and Denmark, we adopt a CSCW perspective—rooted in theories of invisible work, coordination artifacts, and shared information spaces—to explore how template design affects the balance between documentation requirements and patient-centered care. Our analysis shows that the rigidity of EHR templates constrains professional discretion and prompts pervasive workaround practices that add invisible coordination work and hinder cross-professional knowledge sharing. By foregrounding ”template trimming” as a mechanism through which infrastructure silently redistributes responsibility, the study advances CSCW theorizing on invisible work and boundary objects and offers concrete design directions for more flexible documentation tools.
Bhattarai et al. (Thu,) studied this question.