How We Study Clinical Documentation Practices in the Wild: A Systematic Literature Review of CHI and CSCW
Designing effective clinical documentation systems requires understanding clinical work. While HCI has produced numerous ethnographic studies of documentation practices, we lack a systematic overview of their design implications. This study contextualizes the field by analyzing methods and environments in existing research. We manually screened all ACM proceedings of CHI and CSCW full papers since their founding, identifying 318 articles involving clinicians and a subset of 52 papers that used ethnography to derive design implications for documentation. Our analysis shows that research remains concentrated in US-based emergency and internal medicine. Methodologically, the field has transitioned from "long-haul" residencies to shorter studies supplemented by formal or informal interviews. This work establishes a foundation to evaluate how design implications diverge across specialties, evolve alongside policy pushes or technological developments, and translate across healthcare systems.