Child Health Improvement Through Computer Automation (CHICA) Highlighting Study

Not Applicable

Completed

Conditions: Physician Behavior

Interventions: Other: Receiving Highlighted Prompts
Other: Receiving Non-highlighted Prompts

Registration Number: NCT01583101

Lead Sponsor: Indiana University

Brief Summary: The investigators have developed a novel decision support system for implementing clinical guidelines in pediatric practice. CHICA (Child Health Improvement through Computer Automation) combines three elements: (1) pediatric guidelines encoded in Arden Syntax; (2) a dynamic, scannable paper user interface; and (3) an HL7-compliant interface to existing electronic medical record systems. The result is a system that both delivers "just-in-time" patient-relevant guidelines to physicians during the clinical encounter, and accurately captures structured data from all who interact with it. Preliminary work with CHICA has demonstrated the feasibility of using the system to implement and evaluate clinical guidelines.

However, analyses have shown that physicians ignore a fair number of prompts. The investigators would like to experiment with changes to the system to see if they can increase physicians' response rates. This could include highlighting prompts, reordering them, or flagging them in other ways. The main outcome of interest in the rate at which physicians answer prompts.

Detailed Description: We have developed a novel decision support system for implementing clinical guidelines in pediatric practice. CHICA (Child Health Improvement through Computer Automation) combines three elements: (1) pediatric guidelines encoded in Arden Syntax; (2) a dynamic, scannable paper user interface; and (3) an HL7-compliant interface to existing electronic medical record systems. The result is a system that both delivers "just-in-time" patient-relevant guidelines to physicians during the clinical encounter, and accurately captures structured data from all who interact with it. Preliminary work with CHICA has demonstrated the feasibility of using the system to implement and evaluate clinical guidelines.

However, analyses have shown that physicians ignore a fair number of prompts. We would like to experiment with changes to the system to see if we can increase physicians' response rates. This could include highlighting prompts, reordering them, or flagging them in other ways. The main outcome of interest is the rate at which physicians answer prompts.

This will be a randomized, controlled trial of the CHICA system to see if we can improve prompt response rates. We will randomize physicians or clinics to receive some form of prompt change, including highlighting them, reordering them, or flagging them. No other changes will be made to care.

We will extract data from the CHICA system for all patients seen in our study clinics. This data will include a the clinic location, whether or not a physician responded to a prompt, the prompt's position on the form, the patient's gender, the rule priority of the prompt, rule title, patient insurance category, the patient's age in days, and the name of the provider. The main outcome of interest is whether or not a prompt was answered (discussed/not discussed).

Recruitment & Eligibility

Status: COMPLETED

Sex: All

Target Recruitment: 2237

Inclusion Criteria

Physicians practicing in one of our four CHICA clinics who use CHICA

Exclusion Criteria

Not being a physician practicing in one of our four CHICA clinics who use CHICA

Study & Design

Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL

Study Design: PARALLEL

Arm && Interventions

Group	Intervention	Description
Receiving Highlighted Prompts	Receiving Highlighted Prompts	Prompts received by physicians were highlighted.
Receiving Non-highlighted Prompts	Receiving Non-highlighted Prompts	Prompts received by physicians were not highlighted.

Primary Outcome Measures