Implementing an interface terminology for structured clinical documentation.

Clinically oriented interface terminologies support interactions between humans and computer programs that accept structured entry of healthcare information. This manuscript describes efforts over the past decade to introduce an interface terminology called CHISL (Categorical Health Information Structured Lexicon) into clinical practice as part of a computer-based documentation application at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Vanderbilt supports a spectrum of electronic documentation modalities, ranging from transcribed dictation, to a partial template of free-form notes, to strict, structured data capture. Vanderbilt encourages clinicians to use what they perceive as the most appropriate form of clinical note entry for each given clinical situation. In this setting, CHISL occupies an important niche in clinical documentation. This manuscript reports challenges developers faced in deploying CHISL, and discusses observations about its usage, but does not review other relevant work in the field.

A surveillance tool to support quality assurance and research in personalized medicine.

Developing effective methods to enable the practice of personalized medicine is a national priority for translational science. By leveraging modern genotyping technology and health information technologies, prescribing therapies based on genotype becomes an achievable goal. Within this manuscript, we describe the development, implementation, and piloting of a surveillance tool to assure the quality of clinical decision making in the context of new pharmacogenetic information. The surveillance tool allows a quality assurance (QA) team to review significant genotyping results and deliver focused educational interventions to providers. We report on the first eight patients undergoing genotyping to support antiplatelet therapy selection after drug-eluting stent placement. The collected pilot data supports an informatics approach to QA process management, as our tool delivered actionable patient information. It also enabled providers to tailor antiplatelet therapy to individual patients' genotypes. Our expectation is to continue collecting surveillance reports to perform an in-depth analysis of our tool.