Applied clinical informatics
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Scribes are assisting Emergency Physicians by writing their electronic clinical notes at the bedside during consultations. They increase physician productivity and improve their working conditions. The quality of Emergency scribe notes is unevaluated and important to determine. ⋯ The PDQI-9 documentation quality tool did not demonstrate reliability or validity in evaluating Emergency Medicine consultation notes. We found no evidence that scribed notes were of poorer quality than non-scribed notes, however Emergency scribe note quality has not yet been determined.
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Adoption of a common data model across health systems is a key infrastructure requirement to allow large scale distributed comparative effectiveness analyses. There are a growing number of common data models (CDM), such as Mini-Sentinel, and the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) CDMs. ⋯ The data transformation to the CDM was time consuming and resources required were substantial, beyond requirements for collecting native source data. The need to manually code subsets of data limited the conversion. However, once the native data was converted to the CDM, both systems were then able to use the same queries to identify cohorts. Thus, the CDM minimized the effort to develop cohorts and analyze the results across the sites.
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Clinical trials are an important research method for improving medical knowledge and patient care. Multiple international and national guidelines stipulate the need for data quality and assurance. Many strategies and interventions are developed to reduce error in trials, including standard operating procedures, personnel training, data monitoring, and design of case report forms. However, guidelines are nonspecific in the nature and extent of necessary methods. ⋯ Clinical trial sites are implementing ad hoc methods pragmatically to ensure data quality. Findings highlight the necessity for further research into "standard practice" focusing on developing and implementing publically available data quality monitoring procedures.
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Identifying pneumonia using diagnosis codes alone may be insufficient for research on clinical decision making. Natural language processing (NLP) may enable the inclusion of cases missed by diagnosis codes. ⋯ System-wide application of NLP to clinical text can increase capture of initial diagnostic hypotheses, an important inclusion when studying diagnosis and clinical decision-making under uncertainty.
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High-quality clinical notes are essential to effective clinical communication. However, electronic clinical notes are often long, difficult to review, and contain information that is potentially extraneous or out of date. Additionally, many clinicians write electronic clinical notes using customized templates, resulting in notes with significant variability in structure. There is a need to understand better how clinicians review electronic notes and how note structure variability may impact clinicians' note-reviewing experiences. ⋯ Our findings support the need to improve EHR note design and presentation to support optimal note review patterns for clinicians.