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* From the VA Puget Sound Health Care System, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
Correspondence to: Thomas H. Payne, MD, VA Puget Sound Health Care System, 1660 South Columbian Way, Mail Stop S-007-CIM, Seattle, WA 98108; e-mail: tpayne{at}u.washington.edu
| Abstract |
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Key Words: decision support systems, clinical drug therapy, computer-assisted hospital information systems medical informatics medical records systems, computerized practice guidelines therapy, computer-assisted
| Introduction |
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Computers are designed to follow predefined instructions provided to them. In health-care decision support systems, these instructions range from simple statements of the form IF this has occurred, THEN do the following pertaining to a specific laboratory result, to highly complex clinical guidelines that include hundreds of interconnected rules. The early use of computers in clinical decision makingand one of the most successful uses todayinvolved use of simple rules governing the myriad of small decisions clinicians make every day. For example, IF the patient has the diagnosis of obstructive lung disease, THEN an influenza vaccine should be given annually. As one of the pioneers in computing decision support systems has stated, "Careful attention to mundane and tedious detail can be more important than brilliance in the day-to-day care of patients . . . the kind of work that humans neither relish nor reliably perform."1
| How Can Computers Aid Decision Making? |
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Simplify Access to Data Needed To Make Decisions
Most practitioners use computing systems, either directly or
indirectly, to gather laboratory results, radiology reports, or the
narrative text of notes or consultations. This is because laboratories
and transcription services have long used computing systems to report
these data. Reporting of results and the creation of a customized
report or graph can make patterns more apparent, leading to faster
decision making. The value of flow sheets for following chronic
conditions has long been recognized.2
Graphic display of
laboratory data can make patterns rapidly apparent; if combined with
display of medications or other interventions, a better understanding
of the course of disease may result.3
This is one of the
simplest forms of decision support, and it is highly popular with
clinicians because it does not require data entry and saves time.
Provide Reminders and Prompts
One of the most powerful tools in the field of clinical computing
is the capability to generate reminders and prompts to clinicians. As
several reviews have shown, reminders change clinician behavior to
improve delivery of chronic, acute, and preventive medical
care.4
5
6
Reminders can be brought to the attention
of clinicians in a variety of ways: printed sheets can be affixed to a
chart before a visit,7
windows can appear on a screen, or
a list of reminders can appear on an electronic "cover sheet."
Usually, reminders include a short message recommending some action be
taken along with the rationale for the reminder appearing on that
particular patient (Fig 1
). Methods of creating, editing, and using rules to trigger reminders
vary greatly among computer decision support systems.8
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Assist in Diagnosis
An early goal of computing systems used in clinical care was to
help the physician establish a diagnosis. Programs such as Internist 1,
Quick Medical Reference (First Data Bank; San Bruno, CA), DXplain
(Laboratory of Computer Science; Boston, MA), and Iliad (Applied
Medical Informatics; Salt Lake City, UT) were designed to consider
historical and physical examination findings, laboratory and
test results, and create a list of diagnoses to explain those
findings.12
13
These systems were based on large
collection of rules and tables that related the presence or absence of
findings with diseases and other conditions. Though they performed
remarkably well, the requirement that large amounts of data be entered
limited their broad use in clinical care. Freestanding applications are
now less common than applications that are tightly integrated with
patient data in a repository or computer-based medical record
system.14
Moreover, much of the information needed to use
these applicationsfor example the presence or absence of symptoms or
physical examination findingsis not routinely captured in computing
systems in a form that can be processed by decision support systems.
Review New Clinical Data; Alert When Important Patterns Are
Recognized
Reminders and order checks are useful methods for drawing
clinicians attention to important occurrences when the clinician is
viewing a computer screen or paper chart, or is in the process of
ordering. However, in some cases, there is a need to bring clinical
events such as a new or changed laboratory result, hospital discharge,
or combination of events to the attention of the clinician at the
moment the event occurs. Event monitors are applications that can
"eavesdrop" on newly available data or the occurrence of events
(hospital admission, discharge, etc) by receiving electronic messages
from computing systems when specified events occur.15
When
an electronic message is received, a specified rule can then be run to
determine if there is a need to notify the clinician or take other
action. An example of the use of an event monitor is in the handling of
culture and sensitivity results. An event monitor can notify the
clinician when there is a mismatch between newly available sensitivity
results and antimicrobials being given to the patient.
| Characteristics of Successful Computer Decision Support Systems |
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They Give Patient-Specific Recommendations
When a computing system provides advice based on a guideline, it
is most useful if the recommendation is based on that patients data.
Of course, this requires that data needed to make the recommendation be
available to the decision support system in machine-processible form.
Collecting these data from their source (laboratory, pharmacy, and
other systems) is preferable to requiring data entry by the
clinician.16
Passive display of guideline documents in the literature, on the World Wide Web, or in other electronic media is not a reliable method for improving compliance or changing practitioner behavior.17 There are several reasons for this. First, there are myriad guidelines available on the World Wide Web, and finding credible guideline documents quickly can take substantial time.18 Second, no matter how convenient access to the documents becomes, simply viewing a document describing a guideline will be less effective than making it easy to follow that guideline.
They Save Time
Most clinicians note that they have less time available than in
the past, because of increased patient volumes, greater demands for
documentation,19
and the complexity of modern practice. An
extremely effective method for changing clinician behavior is to make
it as fast or faster to comply with a recommendation or guideline than
not to comply. There are many strategies for helping clinicians save
time in the process of complying with a guideline.
One approach is to save the time required for visit documentation. If applications can guide clinicians through a guideline and at the same time speed documentation of the visit, then there is an additional incentive to use the application, thereby increasing compliance with the guideline.20 If the same application allows simple and fast ordering of services, there is yet another incentive to use the application.
Some guidelines can be implemented in part or in full by creating collections of orders that can be selected in particular clinical situations. For example, when patients are admitted to the hospital for treatment of community-acquired pneumonia, guidelines cover the ordering of cultures and other diagnostic tests, and empirical selection of antibiotics. Collections of ordersoften referred to as order sets or order templatescan be created and offered to the clinician either in paper form or in an order-entry application. Since the orders are conveniently grouped to save time during the ordering process, this is a potentially useful method of implementing some types of guidelines.
They Are Incorporated Into Workflow of Clinic, Office, or Hospital
Health-care delivery is a complex effort with labor divided among
many professions: physicians, nurses, pharmacists, other professionals,
and support staff. Computing systems should be designed to fit into
this workflow as smoothly as possible, because changing the workflow of
large numbers of professionals is difficult. A successfully designed
computer decision support system must either fit in well with this
workflow, or those implementing it must be prepared to change the
workflow.
| Examples of Successful Computer Decision Support Systems |
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HIV Guidelines at Boston Beth Israel
Management of HIV infection is a complex, rapidly evolving field
with a large number of guidelines available to practitioners. Safran
and colleagues21
hypothesized that compliance with HIV
care guidelines would be greater if the guidelines were incorporated
into the clinical computing applications in use at Boston Beth Israel
Hospital. They demonstrated that clinicians who received alerts and
reminders containing patient-specific recommendations instituted
appropriate treatment far more rapidly than clinicians who did not. One
of the most dramatic effects was in the time between the availability
of confirmed T-cell counts < 200 cells per mL3
and institution of prophylaxis against Pneumocystis
carinii pneumonia. In the control group, the average elapsed time
was 122 days, while in patients treated by physicians who received
prompts to prescribe prophylaxis, the average elapsed time was 11 days.
An important reason for this success was the provision of screens that
both notified the clinician of the need for prophylaxis and greatly
simplified the process of ordering it.
Antimicrobial Use in the ICU
In a trial conducted in the critical care unit, researchers at the
LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, studied outcomes for
patients for whom antimicrobials were ordered using a computer decision
support system.22
This application considers patient
allergies, likely pathogens, local patterns of antimicrobial
resistance, antimicrobials on the formulary, hepatic and renal
function, the results of cultures, and other factors when recommending
therapy. The authors also noted that manually gathering data needed to
prescribe antimicrobials would take up to 25 min. Patients treated
using this computer-assisted management program for antimicrobials
received fewer doses of antimicrobials, had fewer days of excessive
drug dosage, fewer prescriptions for drugs to which the patient was
allergic, shorter length of hospital stay, and lower hospital costs,
compared to patients treated without this program. There were several
other improvements beyond these, leaving little question of the
advantage of such an application over the traditional methods for
ordering antimicrobials.
| The Veterans Affairs Computerized Patient Record System |
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CPRS includes numerous decision support features: on-screen reminders for a wide variety of acute, chronic, and preventive care topics; order checks for drug-drug, drug-food, drug-allergy interactions, and for duplicate laboratory testing; order sets; graphic display of laboratory results; and templates to guide and simplify document creation. Since all orders entered on hospital wards using CPRS are entered directly by practitioners in our hospital, there is great potential to influence compliance with organizational guidelines and recommendations for management of patients with specific clinical conditions. The following section describes our early efforts to take advantage of one of these decision support features: order sets.
The choice of diagnostic tests and antimicrobial selection can influence the effectiveness and costs of therapy. Our Pulmonary and Infectious Diseases sections have developed collections of orders for practitioners to consider when writing hospital admission orders for patients with community-acquired pneumonia. These orders are easily selectable from hospital admission order screens used whenever patients are hospitalized on the Medical Service. Additions or changes to these screens are immediately available on the > 2,000 workstations used by physicians, nurses, and other staff at VA Puget Sound.
The content of order screens for community-acquired pneumoniaand for hundreds of screens containing other ordersis completely within the control of the staff of our organization. This is both a great advantage and a challenge, since these orders must be regularly reviewed to remain current, and there are inevitably debates on what form the orders should take. Our solution is to document both the content and review process for these order screens on our internal Web site, using a format inspired by pioneering work at LDS Hospital. Each order collection has a primary author, a primary reviewing group, and is reviewed by other organizational groups such as nursing and pharmacy. The rationale for the orders and references supporting them are also included.
We are only 8 months into our use of the CPRS on our busiest wards, and we have not yet studied the effect of these decision support features on practitioner behavior or on clinical or financial outcomes. However, we have established the foundation on which our organization can implement computer-based decision support. The components of that foundation are described in the next section.
| Requirements for Implementing Computer Decision Support Systems |
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Next, there must be a computing infrastructure in place: databases containing patient data, workstations near or at the point of care, and reliable networks to connect them. Printed reports can be used for many purposes, and to reduce the need for workstations in examination rooms, but order-entry applications with immediate feedback depend on the direct use of mobile or desktop workstations by clinicians.
There must be guidelines or algorithms incorporated into the clinical computing system, and there must be patient data in processible form. The latter requirement is difficult to achieve quickly, and represents one of the greatest hurdles for the broader use of computer decision support systems. Much of the content of the patient record is in narrative text form, though there has been recent progress in unlocking this information using natural language processing techniques.25
Clinical guidelines vary greatly in their level of precision. Some contain clear descriptions that can be readily interpreted and acted on by the physician, while others include more general statements of the approach to a particular problem. In order for computer decision support systems to be effective, there must be a trusted, tested, precise rule or guideline to be implemented in the automated system.26 27 There is no substitute for testing of decision support systems in real-world settings, with serial editing and improvement of the rule until it performs as expected.
A commonly voiced concern of physicians about computer systems in clinical care is whether using them will take more time, which may be the case, at least initially.28 29 There is also concern both among health-care providers and the public that health information remains confidential. If computer decision support systems use identified patient data, they must be designed to protect the confidentiality of those data. Combinations of policies and technical approaches can greatly reduce the risk that confidential information will be inappropriately disclosed.30
Exchange of Rules Used by Computer Decision Support Systems
Some organizations have created large collections of rules that
could potentially be exported to other settings where the computing
infrastructure necessary to use them is in place. Exchanging rules
would allow the organization to benefit from the iterative refinement
of rules achieved in the site where they were developed, and allow
organizations to concentrate their effort on developing rules in other
areas.
There have been several efforts to allow exchange of decision support rules: (1) The Arden Syntax, a standard language for expressing rules used to generate alerts and reminders,31 has been used in some organizations to encode rules, and to exchange them with other organizations. (2) More recently, the GuideLine Interchange Format has been proposed to allow exchange clinical practice guidelines among institutions and computer-based applications.32 (3) There is a utility within the VA CPRS to allow exchange of the code required to trigger reminders between the > 100 sites using CPRS. Today, these tools for exchange of decision support rules are used by only a small number of organizations, but as the number of organizations utilizing computer decision support systems rises, these tools could increase sharing of automated clinical rules.
| Summary |
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| Footnotes |
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| References |
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