Automation speeds up doctor's screening

Automation provides medical assessments of pediatric patients at each visit saving time for primary care physicians, U.S. researchers say. Vibha Anand of the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis and the Regenstrief Institute and colleagues said implementing Preventive Services Task Force and American Academy of Pediatrics preventive service guidelines within the short duration of a visit is difficult. A clinical decision support system integrated with electronic medical records offer a good strategy for implementing screening in waiting rooms, Anand said. Child Health Improvement via Computer Automation is a pediatric clinical decision support system, developed by Anand and colleagues, encodes clinical guidelines as medical logic modules to generate scanable paper forms. The patient screening form collects data from patient families in the waiting room and the physician worksheet provide physician assessments at each visit, the researchers said. The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found from a group of 16,963 patients, 408,601 questions were asked in 31,843 visits. Of the 89 percent of questions answered, 11 percent identified positive risk screens in both the younger children and the adolescent age groups.