P-CAPE: a high-level tool for entering and processing clinical practice guidelines. Partners Computerized Algorithm and Editor.

The Partners Computerized Algorithm Processor and Editor (P-CAPE) is a high-level tool intended to remove the programming bottleneck for implementing practice guidelines in our computer-based record system, and to integrate guideline-based advice into the clinician's workflow. P-CAPE has three major components: 1) An Editor that allows an analyst to enter the parameters of a guideline in the form of an algorithm; 2) A Navigator that processes the steps of the guideline and logs all transactions in a patient-specific file; and 3) A clinician Notifier that sends messages to a patient's covering clinician, seeking data or presenting recommendations and order sets that can be processed by the system. P-CAPE's guideline object model was adapted from the InterMed Collaboratory GuideLine Interface Format (GLIF).

Advanced alerting features: displaying new relevant data and retracting alerts.

We added two advanced features to our automated alerting system. The first feature identifies and displays, at the time an alert is reviewed, relevant data filed between the login time of a specimen leading to an alerting result and the time the alert is reviewed. Relevant data is defined as data of the same kind as generated the alert. The other feature retracts alerts when the alerting value is edited and no longer satisfies the alerting criteria. We evaluated the two features for a 14-week period (new relevant data) and a 6-week period (retraction). Of a total of 1104 alerts in the 14-week evaluation, 286 (25.9%) had new relevant data displayed at alert review time. Of the 286, 75.2% were due to additions of comments to the original piece of alerting data; 24.1% were due to new or pending laboratory results of the same type that generated the alert. Two alerts (out of 490) were retracted in a 6 week period. We conclude that in our system, new clinically relevant data is often added between the time of specimen login and the time that an alerting result from that specimen is reviewed. Retractions occur rarely but are important to detect and communicate.

Detecting alerts, notifying the physician, and offering action items: a comprehensive alerting system.

We developed and evaluated a system to automatically identify serious clinical conditions in inpatients. The system notifies the patient's covering physician via his pager that an alert is present and offers potential therapies for the patient's condition (action items) at the time he views the alert information. Over a 6 month period, physicians responded to 1214 (70.2%) of 1730 alerts for which they were paged; they responded to 1002 (82.5% of the 1214) in less than 15 minutes. They said they would take action in 71.5% of the alerts, and they placed an order directly from the alert display screen in 39.4%. Further study is needed to determine if this alerting system improves processes or outcomes of care.

Coverage List: a provider-patient database supporting advanced hospital information services.

We have developed a provider-patient database system, known as Coverage List, which maintains the associations between house staff and inpatients in a teaching hospital. Coverage List automatically links each patient to the proper resident when the patient is admitted, and updates the linkage whenever the resident coverage changes due to night or weekend coverage, physician illness, changes in clinical rotations, and other factors. Using this association, decision-support applications that detect significant clinical events can transmit them directly to the responsible resident. Sign-out and patient-review systems, which collect information on all of a physician's patients, always know the patients for whom that physician is responsible. Nurses who need to contact a physician about a patient issue always know which physician is covering that patient. Coverage List also manages schedule entry and display for physicians, or for any other staff members. A physician can enter individual schedule changes, sign out her service and her pager for the day, and page consultants automatically without going through an operator. These functions support clinical practice directly and enhance the value of other clinical programs.

A very large PC LAN as the basis for a hospital information system.

Brigham and Women's Hospital is converting its financial, administrative and clinical information systems from a mini-computer environment to a platform based on MUMPS and a network of several thousand personal computers. This article describes the project rationale and status and provides an overview of the architecture of the new system. The initial results of the project indicate that the personal computer network can provide large amounts of processor power and storage at costs per unit of power and storage that are several times less expensive than the minicomputer environment. The performance of the converted Accounts Payable system indicates that the architecture can deliver acceptable performance.