Study: Patient-specific dashboard drives quality care
Using a patient-specific diabetes dashboard improves both the efficiency and accuracy of acquiring data needed for high-quality diabetes care, according to research published in the September/October edition of Annals of Family Medicine.
Richelle J. Koopman, MD, MS, from the Curtis W. and Ann H. Long Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia, and colleagues compared use of a new diabetes dashboard screen with use of a conventional approach of viewing multiple EHR screens to find data needed for ambulatory diabetes care.
Measuring time, number of mouse-clicks and accuracy, 10 primary care physicians first searched their EHR for 10 diabetes data elements using a conventional approach for a simulated patient, and then using a new diabetes dashboard for another.
The mean time needed to find all data elements was 5.5 minutes using the conventional approach versus 1.3 minutes using the diabetes dashboard. Physicians correctly identified 94 percent of the data requested using the conventional method, versus 100 percent with the dashboard.
The mean number of mouse clicks was 60 for conventional searching versus three clicks with the diabetes dashboard. “A common theme was that in everyday practice, if physicians had to spend too much time searching for data, they would either continue without it or order a test again,” Koopman and colleagues stated.
Using the dashboard also reduced errors. Of the 100 total data elements sought (10 physicians each searching for 10 elements), there were three instances of recording incorrect data and three instances in which a data element could not be found. All errors were with the conventional EHR search (94 percent accuracy) compared with none with the dashboard (100 percent accuracy).
“Usability analysis tools can provide important insights into the value of optimizing physician use of health information technologies,” the authors concluded.
“Proactive planning and evaluation through a … socio-technical model of safe and effective health IT use can help organizations make sure that they have addressed all the key requirements of any successful health IT project, wrote Dean F. Sittig, PhD, from the School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston, in an accompanying editorial.
“No matter how good a new health IT system in general or clinical decision support interventions are, if you do not have adequate hardware to run the application, access to the data, a good place in the workflow to inject the system, people to take the actions recommended by the computer and a regulatory environment that will allow the implementation to proceed, you will have difficulties.”
Richelle J. Koopman, MD, MS, from the Curtis W. and Ann H. Long Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia, and colleagues compared use of a new diabetes dashboard screen with use of a conventional approach of viewing multiple EHR screens to find data needed for ambulatory diabetes care.
Measuring time, number of mouse-clicks and accuracy, 10 primary care physicians first searched their EHR for 10 diabetes data elements using a conventional approach for a simulated patient, and then using a new diabetes dashboard for another.
The mean time needed to find all data elements was 5.5 minutes using the conventional approach versus 1.3 minutes using the diabetes dashboard. Physicians correctly identified 94 percent of the data requested using the conventional method, versus 100 percent with the dashboard.
The mean number of mouse clicks was 60 for conventional searching versus three clicks with the diabetes dashboard. “A common theme was that in everyday practice, if physicians had to spend too much time searching for data, they would either continue without it or order a test again,” Koopman and colleagues stated.
Using the dashboard also reduced errors. Of the 100 total data elements sought (10 physicians each searching for 10 elements), there were three instances of recording incorrect data and three instances in which a data element could not be found. All errors were with the conventional EHR search (94 percent accuracy) compared with none with the dashboard (100 percent accuracy).
“Usability analysis tools can provide important insights into the value of optimizing physician use of health information technologies,” the authors concluded.
“Proactive planning and evaluation through a … socio-technical model of safe and effective health IT use can help organizations make sure that they have addressed all the key requirements of any successful health IT project, wrote Dean F. Sittig, PhD, from the School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston, in an accompanying editorial.
“No matter how good a new health IT system in general or clinical decision support interventions are, if you do not have adequate hardware to run the application, access to the data, a good place in the workflow to inject the system, people to take the actions recommended by the computer and a regulatory environment that will allow the implementation to proceed, you will have difficulties.”