A Clinician-Centered Evaluation of the Usability of AHLTA and Automated Clinical Practice Guidelines at TAMC

Abstract : The project will demonstrate that Clinical Decision Support (CDS) material can be retrieved from a central, shared repository and executed within the MHS and civilian health information systems to improve quality of care through the use of reminders, alerts, guidelines etc. The system design and approach will decrease guideline development time and speed translation of evidence based medicine into clinical practice. It will decrease costs and enable multiple stakeholders to work in an open content/source environment to exchange clinical content, develop and test technology and explore processes in applied CDS. Design: Comparative study between the KMR infrastructure and capabilities developed as an open source, vendor agnostic solution for aCPG execution within AHLTA and the current DoD/MHS standard evaluating: H1: An open source, open standard KMR and Clinical Decision Support Engine can enable organizations to share domain knowledge, expertise, and collaborate on efforts to improve patient safety and quality of care using automated clinical practice guidelines. H2: An open standard KMR and Clinical Decision Support Engine can codify clinical practice guidelines and domain knowledge so that they can be executed without modification within a variety of runtime environments, including AHTLA and VistA. H3: An open standard KMR and Clinical Decision Support Engine can effectively manage both generic clinical domain knowledge (guidelines, best practice, etc) and specific institutional requirements (workflow, policy, capabilities) to ensure reliable execution of a CPG across institutional boundaries.