Effect of an Electronic Health Record "Nudge" on Opioid Prescribing and Electronic Health Record Keystrokes in Ambulatory Care.

BACKGROUND: Multiple policy initiatives encourage more cautious prescribing of opioids in light of their risks. Electronic health record (EHR) redesign can influence prescriber choices, but some redesigns add to workload. OBJECTIVE: To estimate the effect of an EHR prescribing redesign on both opioid prescribing choices and keystrokes. DESIGN: Quality improvement quasi-experiment, analyzed as interrupted time series. PARTICIPANTS: Adult patients of an academic multispecialty practice and a federally qualified health center (FQHC) who received new prescriptions for short-acting opioids, and their providers. INTERVENTION: In the redesign, new prescriptions of short-acting opioids defaulted to the CDC-recommended minimum for opioid-naïve patients, with no alerts or hard stops, such that 9 keystrokes were required for a guideline-concordant prescription and 24 for a non-concordant prescription. MAIN MEASURES: Proportion of guideline-concordant prescriptions, defined as new prescriptions with a 3-day supply or less, calculated per 2-week period. Number of mouse clicks and keystrokes needed to place prescriptions. KEY RESULTS: Across the 2 sites, 22,113 patients received a new short-acting opioid prescription from 821 providers. Before the intervention, both settings showed secular trends toward smaller-quantity prescriptions. At the academic practice, the intervention was associated with an immediate increase in guideline-concordant prescriptions from an average of 12% to 31% of all prescriptions. At the FQHC, about 44% of prescriptions were concordant at the time of the intervention, which was not associated with an additional significant increase. However, total keystrokes needed to place the concordant prescriptions decreased 62.7% from 3552 in the 6 months before the intervention to 1323 in the 6 months afterwards. CONCLUSIONS: Autocompleting prescription forms with guideline-recommended values was associated with a large increase in guideline concordance in an organization where baseline concordance was low, but not in an organization where it was already high. The redesign markedly reduced the number of keystrokes needed to place orders, with important implications for EHR-related stress. TRIAL REGISTRATION: www.ClinicalTrials.gov protocol 1710018646.

A dataset on body composition, strength and performance in older adults.

This article presents a dataset of body composition, strength and performance measurements in older adults; the data were collected as part of Rancho Bernardo Study (RBS), a longitudinal observational cohort study. All community dwelling adults in Rancho Bernardo, California between 1972 and 1974 were eligible for participation in the study. A subset of the participants returned every four years for subsequent visits. The dataset in this publication consists of some of the measures taken in Visits 7-10, for 1466 subjects who had at least one of these measures taken. We analysed the data with a feed-forward loop model fitted by structural equation modelling. The data can be valuable for modelling and extracting further information on how body composition, strength and performance affect each other over a long period of time. The data are analysed and interpreted in the research article RoyChoudhury et al., 2019.

Feed-forward loop between body composition, strength and performance in older adults.

Frailty syndrome is hypothesized to arise from malfunction in feedback mechanisms among interacting physiological systems. However, empirical evidence to support this hypothesis is not yet available. We present evidence of a feed-forward loop relationship between certain components of the frailty syndrome: body composition, strength and physical performance level. The evidence has been found by performing statistical analysis on measures from 878 females and 588 males aged 60-97, participating in the Rancho Bernardo Study, followed for at least three visits over 12 years. In the analysis, we have used fat mass and lean mass (measured by whole body DXA scans), grip strength (measured by dynamometer) and time to get up and walk a certain distance. The results provide evidence of a feed-forward loop between these variables. The results also suggest that adverse changes in body composition would not only reduce the physical performance and grip strength, but the changes would further result in adverse changes in body composition. Our findings support the hypothesis that feed-forward loops are present between the components of the frailty syndrome at the time of development of frailty, which itself may be a manifestation of dysregulated energetics.