Sb. Henry et al., A TEMPLATE-BASED APPROACH TO SUPPORT UTILIZATION OF CLINICAL-PRACTICEGUIDELINES WITHIN AN ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 5(3), 1998, pp. 237-244
Citations number
49
Categorie Soggetti
Information Science & Library Science","Computer Science Interdisciplinary Applications","Medical Informatics","Computer Science Information Systems
Practice guidelines are an integral part of evidence-based health care
delivery. When the authors decided to install the clinical documentat
ion component of an electronic health record in a nurse practitioner f
aculty practice, however, they found that they lacked the resources to
integrate it immediately with other systems and components that would
support the processing of clinical rules. They were thus challenged t
o devise an initial approach for decision support related to clinical
practice guidelines that did not include interfacing with an inference
engine and set of decision rules. The authors developed a prototypic
application within the WAVE electronic health record that demonstrates
the feasibility of representing a guideline as structured encoded tex
t organized into an online patient-encounter template. Although this a
pproach may be more broadly applicable, it is described within the con
text of the management of diabetes mellitus by nurse practitioners. Th
e advantages of the approach relate primarily to the integration of th
e guideline recommendations with the encounter form, the online intera
ction of the clinician with the system, and the ease of creation and m
odification of the guideline-based encounter form. However, there are
several limitations of the current approach as a result of the inabili
ty to do inference and the lack of integration with patient-specific d
ata to trigger specific rules.