Category: Informatics

Recently, there has been a great deal of coverage on internet news sites with headlines such as “Study: iPads Increase Residency Efficency.”  These headlines are pulled from a “Research Letter” in Archives of Internal Medicine, reporting from the University of Chicago, regarding the distribution of iPads capable of running Epic via Citrix.

Sounds good, but it’s untrue.

What is true is that residents reported that they used the iPads for work.  The additionally thought that it saved them time, and thought it improved their efficiency on the wards.  This is to say, they liked using the iPad.

The part that isn’t true is where the authors claim an increase in “actual resident efficiency.”  By analyzing the hour of the day in which orders are placed, the authors attempt to extrapolate to a hypothetical reality in which this means iPads are helping their residents place orders more quickly on admitted patients, and to place additional orders while post-call, just before leaving the hospital.  There is, in fact, no specific data that using the iPad makes the residents more efficient, only data showing the hour of the day in which orders are placed has changed from one year to the next.  The iPad has, perhaps, changed their work habits – but without prospectively observing how these iPads are being used, it is impossible to conclude how or why.

But, at least they liked them!  And, considering how addictive Angry Birds is, I’m surprised their productivity isn’t decreased.

http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/172/5/436

This is a nice informatics paper that deals mostly with problem lists.  These are meticulously maintained (in theory) by inpatient and ambulatory physicians to accurately reflect a patient’s current medical issues.  Then, when they arrive in the ED, you do your quick chart biopsy from the EMR, and you can rapidly learn about your patient.  However, these lists are invariably inaccurate – studies show they’ll appropriately be updated with breast cancer 78% of the time, but as low as 4% of the time for renal insufficiency.  This is bad because, supposedly, accurate problem lists lead to higher-quality care – more CHF patients receiving ACE or ARBs if it was on their diagnosis list, etc.

These authors created a natural language processing engine, as well as a set of inference rules based on medications, lab results, and billing codes for 17 diagnoses, and implemented an alert prompt to encourage clinicians to update the problem list as necessary.  Overall, 17,043 alerts were fired during the study period, and clinicians accepted the recommendations of 41% – which could be better, but it’s really quite good for an alert.  As you might expect, the study group with the alerts generated 3 times greater additions to the patient problem lists.  These authors think this is a good thing – although, I have seen some incredible problem list bloat.

What’s interesting is that a follow-up audit of alerts to evaluate their accuracy based on clinical reading of the patient’s chart estimated the alerts were 91% accurate – which means all those ignored alerts were actually mostly correct.  So, there’s clearly still a lot of important work that needs to go into finding better ways to integrate this sort of clinical feedback into the workflow.

So, in theory, better problem lists, better outcomes.  However, updating your wife’s problem list can probably wait until after Valentine’s Day.

“Improving completeness of electronic problem lists through clinical decision support: a randomized, controlled trial.”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22215056

It’s not a terribly profound paper – along the lines of “we did this and we liked it” sort of thing – but it is a relevant educational application of wikis in medicine.

The BIDMC Internal Medicine department undertook an initiative to essentially convert all their little handbooks and service guides to an online reference.  They chose the wiki interface so anyone could update information or add pages while allowing updates to be tracked and rolled back as necessary.  They promoted it during their intern orientation and made a significant effort both to get people to update it and use it.  And, for the most part, they were successful.  Most residents (92%) thought it was useful, it was mostly used to find phone numbers and rotation specific clinical information, and, overall, about half of the PGY-2 and -3s updated the site during the 2009-10 year.

It probably takes a lot of effort and requires just the right collaborative environment, but there are a lot of residencies, departments, or other clinical organizations that could also probably benefit from something similar – particularly if there are a lot of rotating students/residence between difference services or sites.

“Adoption of a wiki within a large internal medicine residency program: a 3-year experience”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22140210

Though, from this data, it’s not clear through what mechanism.

This is an retrospective billing database evaluation of Memphis Emergency Department visits between 2007 and 2008.  In Memphis, 12 EDs participate in an online data repository, which may be accessed by secure web connection.  The authors compared patients presenting to the Emergency Department for whom this medical record was accessed to patients for whom this record was not.

There were no baseline differences between the demographics of the study groups, although, this retrospective evaluation cannot account for the factors contributing to why physicians chose to access the information exchange for individual patients.

The results are rather odd.  The authors cite cost savings as a result of an OR of 0.27 for inpatient hospitalization after accessing the information exchange.  However, the frequency of basically every other type of activity stayed flat or increased – in fact, the OR for Head CT was 5.0 and a chest x-ray was 4.3 if information exchange records were accessed.

More tests?  Fewer admissions?  I’m not sure it’s practical to generalize the effects of an information exchange on medical decision making in a retrospective fashion such as this.

“The financial impact of health information exchange on emergency department care.”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22058169