Improving Safety and Quality With Outpatient Order Entry

Quality gaps that are relevant to the ambulatory setting include a high incidence of adverse drug events and lack of compliance to established guidelines for preventive care, chronic disease management and test result follow-up. Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) and ambulatory computerized physician order entry (ACPOE) have been touted as powerful interventions to address these concerns. However, doubts exist about the efficacy of these systems in the ambulatory setting, especially when they exist in isolation. Also, despite the evidence of the impact of inpatient CPOE, the impact of ACPOE has not been well studied. Moreover, the adoption of CDSS and ACPOE systems is slow, and their value proposition remains uncertain.

Tightly integrating CDSS with ACPOE serves as a promising strategy to improve quality and efficiency in the ambulatory setting by facilitating physician action. When ACPOE is linked with CDSS, clinicians can be prompted at various points during their workflow about the desirable course of action and simultaneously be given the opportunity to execute the action (by ordering it) with minimal effort. We hypothesize that the value of ACPOE integrated with advanced CSDSS lies in improved medication safety and guideline compliance, but also improved efficiencies for the provider and the health-care system. We further hypothesize that the value added by these systems overall out weights their costs. This study will evaluate the impact of integrating ACPOE with advanced CDSS on important safety and quality domains in the ambulatory setting using randomized controlled trials. In addition, we will evaluate the impact on organizational efficiency, physician workflow and satisfaction, and perform a cost-benefit analysis.

There are 2 interventions periods. During Intervention Period 1, a randomized selection of clinics (Arm 1) will receive basic order entry without integrated decision support (i.e. no intervention) while another randomized selection of clinics (Arm 2) receive order entry integrated with decision support in the form of delivery of reminders and alerts during a clinical encounter (Intervention A). During Intervention Period 2, Arm 2 clinics will continue to receive Intervention A. However, Arm 1 clinics receive Intervention A plus additional decision support delivered in between clinic encounters (Intervention B).

Comparisons:

We will evaluate the impact of Intervention A (during visit) and intervention B (between visits) in 2 clustered randomized controlled trials, giving us accurate estimates of their individual efficacies. This is particularly important because these findings will highlight the relative value of these 2 different modes of decision support and inform organizations and vendors about how to invest their development resources. We also will be able to evaluate the combined impact of interventions A and B (between visits) by comparing the outcome in Arm 2 across the 2 intervention periods while simultaneously controlling for any secular trends (as observed in Arm 1 across the 2 intervention periods). All clinics, regardless of randomization status, will have access to at least one intervention during study period.