Electronic Health Record Adolescent Confidentiality in a Safety Net Setting.

BACKGROUND: The 21st Century Cures Act provides improved access to one's medical record but presents new challenges to adolescent confidentiality in the domain of health care information technology. Adolescent patients, who have the right to confidential care in certain areas as dictated by state law, face the prospect of parents and guardians erroneously accessing their confidential health information. OBJECTIVES: Our institution, the largest safety net hospital in our region, sought to quantify the proportion of adolescent patient portal accounts likely being accessed by guardians and to implement corrective measures for the patient portal sign-up process in our electronic health record (EHR) system. METHODS: We manually reviewed our institution's adolescent patient portal accounts based on email addresses associated with adolescents' accounts. We implemented EHR changes to address the potential for breach of confidentiality as a result of adolescent patient portal account creation by guardians. One intervention was creating a "guardrail rule" to prevent guardians from creating adolescent patient portal accounts with their own email addresses. After email reminders to adolescent patients to update their accounts, we deactivated accounts with concern for erroneous guardian access. RESULTS: Sixty percent of our institution's adolescent patient portal accounts had possible direct access by guardians. Following requests to update account access, 425 (18.8%) of accounts had email addresses updated by adolescent patients and 1,830 (81.2%) accounts were deactivated. CONCLUSION: More nuanced EHR functionality for adolescent patients and their guardians can help health care systems provide confidential, patient-centered care for adolescents, while allowing guardians to access appropriate health information to facilitate care. There is an opportunity for a national consensus on how adolescents and their guardians can access health information by patient portal.

Performance of three screening tools to predict COVID-19 positivity in emergency department patients.

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 symptoms vary widely. This retrospective study assessed which of three clinical screening tools-a nursing triage screen (NTS), an ED review of systems (ROS) performed by physicians and physician assistants and a standardised ED attending (ie, consultant) physician COVID-19 probability assessment (PA)-best identified patients with COVID-19 on a subsequent reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) confirmation. METHODS: All patients admitted to Boston Medical Center from the ED between 27 April 2020 and 17 May 2020 were included. Sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) were calculated for each method. Logistic regression assessed each tool's performance. RESULTS: The attending physician PA had higher sensitivity (0.62, 95% CI 0.53 to 0.71) than the NTS (0.46, 95% CI 0.37 to 0.56) and higher specificity (0.76, 95% CI 0.72 to 0.80) than the NTS (0.71, 95% CI 0.66 to 0.75) and ED ROS (0.62, 95% CI 0.58 to 0.67). Categorisation as moderate or high probability on the ED physician PA was associated with the highest odds of having COVID-19 in regression analyses (adjusted OR=4.61, 95% CI 3.01 to 7.06). All methods had a low PPV (ranging from 0.26 for the ED ROS to 0.40 for the attending physician PA) and a similar NPV (0.84 for both the NTS and the ED ROS, and 0.89 for the attending physician PA). CONCLUSION: The ED attending PA had higher sensitivity and specificity than the other two methods, but none was accurate enough to replace a COVID-19 RT-PCR test in a clinical setting where transmission control is crucial. Therefore, we recommend universal COVID-19 testing prior to all admissions.

Live Usability Testing of Two Complex Clinical Decision Support Tools: Observational Study.

BACKGROUND: Potential of the electronic health records (EHR) and clinical decision support (CDS) systems to improve the practice of medicine has been tempered by poor design and the resulting burden they place on providers. CDS is rarely tested in the real clinical environment. As a result, many tools are hard to use, placing strain on providers and resulting in low adoption rates. The existing CDS usability literature relies primarily on expert opinion and provider feedback via survey. This is the first study to evaluate CDS usability and the provider-computer-patient interaction with complex CDS in the real clinical environment. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to further understand the barriers and facilitators of meaningful CDS usage within a real clinical context. METHODS: This qualitative observational study was conducted with 3 primary care providers during 6 patient care sessions. In patients with the chief complaint of sore throat, a CDS tool built with the Centor Score was used to stratify the risk of group A Streptococcus pharyngitis. In patients with a chief complaint of cough or upper respiratory tract infection, a CDS tool built with the Heckerling Rule was used to stratify the risk of pneumonia. During usability testing, all human-computer interactions, including audio and continuous screen capture, were recorded using the Camtasia software. Participants' comments and interactions with the tool during clinical sessions and participant comments during a postsession brief interview were placed into coding categories and analyzed for generalizable themes. RESULTS: In the 6 encounters observed, primary care providers toggled between addressing either the computer or the patient during the visit. Minimal time was spent listening to the patient without engaging the EHR. Participants mostly used the CDS tool with the patient, asking questions to populate the calculator and discussing the results of the risk assessment; they reported the ability to do this as the major benefit of the tool. All providers were interrupted during their use of the CDS tool by the need to refer to other sections of the chart. In half of the visits, patients' clinical symptoms challenged the applicability of the tool to calculate the risk of bacterial infection. Primary care providers rarely used the incorporated incentives for CDS usage, including progress notes and patient instructions. CONCLUSIONS: Live usability testing of these CDS tools generated insights about their role in the patient-provider interaction. CDS may contribute to the interaction by being simultaneously viewed by the provider and patient. CDS can improve usability and lessen the strain it places on providers by being short, flexible, and customizable to unique provider workflow. A useful component of CDS is being as widely applicable as possible and ensuring that its functions represent the fastest way to perform a particular task.

Integrating data from an online diabetes prevention program into an electronic health record and clinical workflow, a design phase usability study.

BACKGROUND: Health information is increasingly being digitally stored and exchanged. The public is regularly collecting and storing health-related data on their own electronic devices and in the cloud. Diabetes prevention is an increasingly important preventive health measure, and diet and exercise are key components of this. Patients are turning to online programs to help them lose weight. Despite primary care physicians being important in patients' weight loss success, there is no exchange of information between the primary care provider (PCP) and these online weight loss programs. There is an emerging opportunity to integrate this data directly into the electronic health record (EHR), but little is known about what information to share or how to share it most effectively. This study aims to characterize the preferences of providers concerning the integration of externally generated lifestyle modification data into a primary care EHR workflow. METHODS: We performed a qualitative study using two rounds of semi-structured interviews with primary care providers. We used an iterative design process involving primary care providers, health information technology software developers and health services researchers to develop the interface. RESULTS: Using grounded-theory thematic analysis 4 themes emerged from the interviews: 1) barriers to establishing healthy lifestyles, 2) features of a lifestyle modification program, 3) reporting of outcomes to the primary care provider, and 4) integration with primary care. These themes guided the rapid-cycle agile design process of an interface of data from an online diabetes prevention program into the primary care EHR workflow. CONCLUSIONS: The integration of external health-related data into the EHR must be embedded into the provider workflow in order to be useful to the provider and beneficial for the patient. Accomplishing this requires evaluation of that clinical workflow during software design. The development of this novel interface used rapid cycle iterative design, early involvement by providers, and usability testing methodology. This provides a framework for how to integrate external data into provider workflow in efficient and effective ways. There is now the potential to realize the importance of having this data available in the clinical setting for patient engagement and health outcomes.