title: Emergency department access to a longitudinal medical record.
abstract: Our goal is to assess how clinical information from previous visits is used in the emergency department. We used detailed user audit logs to measure access to different data types. We found that clinician-authored notes and laboratory and radiology data were used most often (common data types were used up to 5% to 20% of the time). Data were accessed less than half the time (up to 20% to 50%) even when the user was alerted to the presence of data. Our access rate indicates that health information exchange projects should be conservative in estimating how often shared data will be used and the wide breadth of data accessed indicates that although a clinical summary is likely to be useful, an ideal solution will supply a broad variety of data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. hripcsak@columbia.edu
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hripcsak
authors.forename: Soumitra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sengupta
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Wilcox
authors.forename: Robert A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Green
mesh_terms: D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital; D006751:Hospital Information Systems; D006801:Humans; D008485:Medical Audit; D008499:Medical Records / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians' / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*