Using Electronic Medical Records to Measure and Improve Adherence to Tobacco Treatment Guidelines in Primary Care

OBJECTIVES:

• Develop an automated coding system using existing electronic medical records (EMRs) to assess adherence to national tobacco-cessation treatment guidelines by individual physicians in the primary care setting at 4 health maintenance organizations.
• Compare the validity of the automated coding system with that of coding performed by medical record abstractors.
• Determine the effect of performance feedback on tobacco treatment practice patterns over 2 years among primary care physicians.
• Provide recommendations for recording tobacco-cessation treatment services in EMR systems and evaluating adherence to treatment guidelines.
• Produce a set of computer programs that can be easily adopted in diverse health care settings for assessing adherence to the national tobacco-cessation treatment guidelines using data from EMRs.

OUTLINE: This is a randomized, controlled, multicenter study. Physicians from each participating center are sorted into pairs according to their rate of providing advice to quit smoking to identified adult smokers and the number of identified adult smokers seen in the 3-month baseline observation period. Each physician in the pair is then randomized to 1 of 2 arms.

• Arm I (automated coding system feedback): Physicians receive reports from an automated coding system regarding their performance in administering tobacco-cessation services in each of the five A's (Ask, Advise, Assess, Assist, and Arrange) to identified smokers in comparison with their past performance and in comparison with their anonymous colleagues once every 3 months. One year after randomization, these physicians are further randomized, using the same paired-group approach, to either continue receiving automated coding system feedback for 1 additional year OR to stop receiving feedback.

Physicians receive a survey at the end of 2-year period regarding the usefulness of each aspect of the feedback reports and the feedback program in general.