Electronic health record: integrating evidence-based information at the point of clinical decision making

Abstract

The authors created two tools to achieve the goals of providing physicians with a way to review alternative diagnoses and improving access to relevant evidence-based library resources without disrupting established workflows. The “diagnostic decision support tool” lifted terms from standard, coded fields in the electronic health record and sent them to Isabel, which produced a list of possible diagnoses. The physicians chose their diagnoses and were presented with the “knowledge page,” a collection of evidence-based library resources. Each resource was automatically populated with search results based on the chosen diagnosis. Physicians responded positively to the “knowledge page.”

Figure 1

Diagnostic decision support tool (DDST) The DDST passes patient information to Isabel. Isabel produces a list of possible diagnoses based on the patient information. When the user chooses one of those diagnoses, the keyword that represents that diagnosis is passed to each resource in the knowledge page via an embedded uniform resource locator.