A randomized trial of population-based clinical decision support to manage health and resource use for Medicaid beneficiaries.

To determine whether a clinical decision support system can favorably impact the delivery of emergency department and hospital services. Randomized clinical trial of three clinical decision support delivery modalities: email messages to care managers (email), printed reports to clinic administrators (report) and letters to patients (letter) conducted among 20,180 Medicaid beneficiaries in Durham County, North Carolina with follow-up through 9 months. Patients in the email group had fewer low-severity emergency department encounters vs. controls (8.1 vs. 10.6/100 enrollees, p < 0.001) with no increase in outpatient encounters or medical costs. Patients in the letter group had more outpatient encounters and greater outpatient and total medical costs. There were no treatment-related differences for patients in the reports group. Among patients <18 years, those in the email group had fewer low severity (7.6 vs. 10.6/100 enrollees, p < 0.001) and total emergency department encounters (18.3 vs. 23.5/100 enrollees, p < 0.001), and lower emergency department ($63 vs. $89, p = 0.002) and total medical costs ($1,736 vs. $2,207, p = 0.009). Patients who were ≥18 years in the letter group had greater outpatient medical costs. There were no intervention-related differences in patient-reported assessments of quality of life and medical care received. The effectiveness of clinical decision support messaging depended upon the delivery modality and patient age. Health IT interventions must be carefully evaluated to ensure that the resultant outcomes are aligned with expectations as interventions can have differing effects on clinical and economic outcomes.

Clinical and economic results from a randomized trial of clinical decision support in a rural health network.

BACKGROUND: Replication studies evaluate technologies in usual use settings. METHODS: We conducted a clinical trial to determine whether reductions in clinical and economic results observed in a previous study could be replicated in a larger setting. Subjects were randomized to receive intervention (email notifications for sentinel health events sent to their care managers) or control. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The primary outcome was the rate of emergency department visits for low severity conditions. Secondary outcomes included: medical costs and other clinical event rates. RESULTS: We randomized 13,454 individuals (intervention, 6740; control, 6714). Subjects in both groups had similar rates of clinical events and medical costs. CONCLUSION: The use of email notifications to care managers was associated with no reductions in clinical events or medical costs.

A randomized clinical trial of clinical decision support in a rural community health network serving lower income individuals: study design and baseline characteristics.

Lower income individuals in the US frequently experience difficulties in obtaining access to needed health care services. We describe a randomized clinical trial that seeks to improve the quality of, and access to healthcare services for medically underserved populations in five rural counties of North Carolina. We propose to achieve these improvements by implementing system-to-system integration via a telehealth network with an asynchronous clinical decision support system for health care providers.

Facilitating consumer clinical information seeking by maintaining referential context: evaluation of a prototypic approach.

Millions of consumers seek health information on the Internet. Unfortunately, this searching often falls short because of design limitations of many consumer-oriented Web sites. In this paper, we describe an approach that addresses several known barriers to consumer health information seeking. This approach primarily involves maintaining the referential context throughout a consumer's search for information. To maintain referential context, this approach uses multiple levels of hierarchical constructs to organize complex information, and data elements are toggled to minimize the need for scrolling. An information resource based on this approach was implemented for information about smoking using standard Web technologies. The resource was evaluated by 31 diverse consumers through standardized usability instruments. Consumers found the resource to be easy to navigate and to use. We conclude that the approach described in this manuscript could be applied more broadly to facilitate the organization and presentation of consumer health information.

Deployment of health information kiosks in diverse community settings: experience and lessons learned.

The use of kiosks in healthcare by patients to collect and deliver health information is growing rapidly. When planning kiosk deployment many factors such as proper location, presentation, access, and support need to be considered to foster usage. This poster describes how these factors were addressed, presents actual experiences with kiosk deployment, and provides lessons learned from the field.

Coupling direct collection of health risk information from patients through kiosks with decision support for proactive care management.

Data collection from patients for use in clinical decision making is foundational for medical practice. Increasingly, kiosks are being used to facilitate direct data collection from patients. However, kiosk-collected data are generally not integrated into the care process. In this project, 4,014 people initiated a kiosk-administered health risk assessment questionnaire using a free-standing public-access kiosk. For 201 of these initiated sessions, kiosk users supplied a Medicaid identification number which allowed their data to be integrated into a regional health information exchange and reviewed by a standards-based clinical decision support system. This system identified 479 survey responses which had been predetermined to warrant follow-up. Notices about these sentinel responses were emailed to care managers and sent to clinical sites. While this study demonstrates the feasibility of collecting and acting on patient-entered health data, it also identifies key challenges to providing proactive care management in this manner.

Determining user preferences between touch and pen data entry methods in the Tablet PC computing environment.

Tablet personal computers (PCs) are becoming common in the clinical environment. In a recent survey comparing mobile devices, the Tablet PC was perceived to have made the most significant difference in the delivery of healthcare. As the use of Tablet PC technology increases, understanding which features are most usable for data entry becomes important. The modality used for data entry on the Tablet PC has evolved. Initially, most Tablet PCs required the use of a stylus or specialized pen for user interaction with the system. Recently, touch screen technology has become available on the Tablet PCs. Tablet PCs with touch screens allow the user to interact with the system using their finger instead of a pen. Little information is available is available concerning user preferences regarding the modality used for data entry on the Tablet PC. In this project we assessed the usability of the two data entry modalities by directly comparing a pen-based and a touch-based Tablet PC through focus groups. This project was part of a Duke IRB approved study designed to assess patient attitudes towards the clinical use of pharmacogenetic data.

Providing contextually relevant health literature for at-risk patients using free-standing touchscreen computer kiosks in community settings.

In this project we describe the successful implementation of a computer kiosk system that collects health risk information directly from patients and provides both contextually relevant and patient-tailored health information. We include usage statistics for kiosks located in community settings and demonstrate that patients will readily utilize these kiosks to access health information.

Development and evaluation of an improved methodology for assessing adherence to evidence-based drug therapy guidelines using claims data.

Non-adherence to evidence-based pharmacotherapy is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Claims data can be used to detect and intervene on such non-adherence, but existing claims-based approaches for measuring adherence to pharmacotherapy guidelines have significant limitations. In this manuscript, we describe a methodology for assessing adherence to pharmacotherapy guidelines that overcomes many of these limitations. To develop this methodology, we first reviewed the literature to identify prior work on potential strategies for overcoming these limitations. We then assembled a team of relevant domain experts to iteratively develop an improved methodology. This development process was informed by the use of the proposed methodology to assess adherence levels for 14 pharmacotherapy guidelines related to seven common diseases among approximately 36,000 Medicaid beneficiaries. Finally, we evaluated the ability of the methodology to overcome the targeted limitations. Based on this evaluation, we conclude that the proposed methodology overcomes many of the limitations associated with existing approaches.

Proactive population health management in the context of a regional health information exchange using standards-based decision support.

The clinic-based healthcare model does not deliver high quality, cost-effective care to populations of patients. Despite public perception that aggressive investment in information technology will lead to improvements in the safety and quality of healthcare delivery, there is little evidence that health information technology can be used to promote population-based health management. This paper describes the use of a standards-based clinical decision support system to facilitate proactive population health management using data from a regional health information exchange (HIE) network. The initial release of this system was designed to detect ten sentinel health events related to hospitalization, emergency department (ED) utilization, and care coordination in a population of 36,000 individuals. In an analysis of 11,899 continuously enrolled patients from a single county over a six-month period, 2,285 unique patients experienced 7,226 sentinel health events. The most common events were ED utilization for low severity conditions (2,546), two or more missed appointments within a 60-day period (1,728), ED encounters for patients with asthma (1,220), and three or more ED encounters within 90 days (731). Logistic regression analysis identified patients aged 19-64 as the population most likely to have sentinel health events. In addition to presenting data demonstrating the feasibility of population health management in the context of an HIE, this paper also includes lessons learned from the development, implementation, and operational support of the population health management system.

User interface considerations for collecting data at the point of care in the tablet PC computing environment.

Collecting clinical data directly from clinicians is a challenge. Many standard development environments designed to expedite the creation of user interfaces for electronic healthcare applications do not provide acceptable components for satisfying the requirements for collecting and displaying clinical data at the point of care on the tablet computer. Through an iterative design and testing approach using think-aloud sessions in the eye care setting, we were able to identify and resolve several user interface issues. Issues that we discovered and subsequently resolved included checkboxes that were too small to be selectable with a stylus, radio buttons that could not be unselected, and font sizes that were too small to be read at arm's length.

Identifying and overcoming obstacles to point-of-care data collection for eye care professionals.

Supporting data entry by clinicians is considered one of the greatest challenges in implementing electronic health records. In this paper we describe a formative evaluation study using three different methodologies through which we identified obstacles to point-of-care data entry for eye care and then used the formative process to develop and test solutions to overcome these obstacles. The greatest obstacles were supporting free text annotation of clinical observations and accommodating the creation of detailed diagrams in multiple colors. To support free text entry, we arrived at an approach that captures an image of a free text note and associates this image with related data elements in an encounter note. The detailed diagrams included a color pallet that allowed changing pen color with a single stroke and also captured the diagrams as an image associated with related data elements. During observed sessions with simulated patients, these approaches satisfied the clinicians' documentation needs by capturing the full range of clinical complexity that arises in practice.

Direct comparison of a tablet computer and a personal digital assistant for point-of-care documentation in eye care.

New mobile computing devices including personal digital assistants (PDAs) and tablet computers have emerged to facilitate data collection at the point of care. Unfortunately, little research has been reported regarding which device is optimal for a given care setting. In this study we created and compared functionally identical applications on a Palm operating system-based PDA and a Windows-based tablet computer for point-of-care documentation of clinical observations by eye care professionals when caring for patients with diabetes. Eye-care professionals compared the devices through focus group sessions and through validated usability surveys. We found that the application on the tablet computer was preferred over the PDA for documenting the complex data related to eye care. Our findings suggest that the selection of a mobile computing platform depends on the amount and complexity of the data to be entered; the tablet computer functions better for high volume, complex data entry, and the PDA, for low volume, simple data entry.

Creation and use of a survey instrument for comparing mobile computing devices.

Both personal digital assistants (PDAs) and tablet computers have emerged to facilitate data collection at the point of care. However, little research has been reported comparing these mobile computing devices in specific care settings. In this study we present an approach for comparing functionally identical applications on a Palm operating system-based PDA and a Windows-based tablet computer for point-of-care documentation of clinical observations by eye care professionals when caring for patients with diabetes. Eye-care professionals compared the devices through focus group sessions and through validated usability surveys. This poster describes the development and use of the survey instrument used for comparing mobile computing devices.

Overcoming obstacles to collecting narrative data from eye care professionals at the point-of-care.

Capturing the nuances of clinical observations in an electronic format has been a major challenge in implementing electronic health records. In a formative evaluation study using three different methodologies, we identified that the greatest obstacle to point-of-care data entry for eye care was supporting free text annotation of clinical observations. To overcome this obstacle, we developed an approach that captures an image of a free text entry and associates this image with related data elements in an encounter note. Through simulated patient studies, we observed that this approach successfully supported complex documentation at the point of care by clinicians.