Analysis of questions asked by family doctors regarding patient care

Objectives To characterise the information needs of: family doctors by coll ecting the questions they asked about patient care during consultations and to classify these in ways that would be useful to developers of knowledge bases. Design Observational study in which investigators visited doctors for two h alf days and collected their questions. Taxonomies were developed to charac terise the clinical topic and generic type of information sought for each q uestion. Setting Eastern Iowa. Participants Random sample of 103 family doctors. Main outcome measures Number of questions posed, pursued, and answered; top ic and generic type of information sought for each question; time spent pur suing answers; information resources used. Results Participants asked a total of 1101 questions. Questions about drug prescribing obstetrics and gynaecology, and adult infectious disease were m ost common and comprised 36% of all questions. The taxonomy of generic ques tions included 69 categories; the three most common types, comprising 24% o f all questions, were "What is the cause of symptom X?" "What is the dose o f drug X?" and "How should I manage disease or finding X?" Answers to most questions (702, 64%) were not immediately pursued, but, of those pursued, m ost (318, 80%) were answered. Doctors spent an average of less than 2 minut es pursuing an answer, and they used readily available print and human reso urces. Only two questions led to a formal literature search. Conclusions Family doctors in this study did not pursue answers to most of their questions. Questions about patient care can be organised into a limit ed number of generic types, which could help guide the efforts of knowledge base developers.