DEVELOPMENT OF A KNOWLEDGE-BASED ELECTRONIC PATIENT RECORD

To help clinicians care for patients with HIV infection, we developed an interactive knowledge-based electronic patient record that integrat es rule-based decision support and full-text information retrieval wit h an online patient record. This highly interactive clinical workstati on now allows the clinicians at a large primary care practice (30,000 ambulatory visits per year) to use online information resources and fu lly electronic patient records during all patient encounters. The resu lting practice database is continually updated with outcome data on a cohort of 700 patients with HIV infection. As a byproduct of this inte grated system, we have developed improved statistical methods to measu re the effects of electronic alerts and reminders.