VISN Collaborative for Improving Hypertension Management With ATHENA-HTN

Background / Rationale:

Despite the existence of evidence-based guidelines, there is a gap between evidence-based recommended best medical practice and actual practice. In previous work, we used hypertension as a model to study the translation of research regarding clinical blood pressure targets and drug choice into primary care practice through computer-based implementation of clinical practice guidelines. In collaboration with experts in guideline-automation at Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (BMIR) (formerly known as Stanford Medical Informatics, SMI), we developed an innovative clinical decision support system: ATHENA-CDS-HTN (hypertension) also known as ATHENA-HTN. ATHENA-HTN is a knowledge-based CDS that uses knowledge bases (KBs) of clinical knowledge of hypertension encoded into computable formats. Clinical data from an electronic health records system is processed with the knowledge in the KB by an execution engine (also known as a guideline interpreter) that generates patient-specific outputs with conclusions about the current state of the patient with respect to the guidelines as shown in the patient's electronic health record data and also generates detailed recommendations for next steps in clinical management of the patient's hypertension. The system is designed to take account of multiple data elements in the patients' clinical data including co-morbid diagnoses that are relevant to hypertension and its treatment, other medications currently prescribed, history of adverse drug reactions/events, and selected laboratory values relevant to hypertension and its management. In previous work, we had demonstrated that deploying this CDS system in VA primary care clinics was feasible and that clinicians found the system usable and useful, as shown by their actual extensive use of the system and their response to a questionnaire survey. The current project was funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D), under a special funding initiative for Quality Enhancement Initiative (QUERI) projects designed to improve care for hypertension by collaboration with a Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN) to implement programs to encourage use of established best-practices for managing hypertension according to evidence-based guidelines available at the time of the study. These studies were known as "VISN Collaboratives". The studies did not involve any new drugs or new uses of established drugs, but rather encouraging use of established drugs recommended in standard evidence-based guidelines for care. The focus of the study was implementation of existing known best practices in managing hypertension, using the CDS as a vehicle to bring information to the point-of-care, with detailed individualized recommendations about patients presented to the primary care provider at the time the provider sees patients in scheduled outpatient primary care clinic visits.

Objective(s):

Our objectives in this VISN Implementation Collaborative included: (1) implement evidence-based guidelines for hypertension in a CDS system by upgrading the ATHENA-HTN knowledge-base (KB) to the most recent guidelines; (2) deploy the CDS system in 5 medical centers within VISN 1 to generate individualized recommendations to primary care clinicians caring for patients in outpatient clinics; (3) evaluate the implementation including the organizational aspects.

Methods: