Electronic health record as a research tool: Frequency of exposure to targeted clinical problems and health care providers' clinical proficiency.

OBJECTIVES

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) could provide insight into possible decay in health care providers' (HCP) clinical knowledge and cognitive performance. Analyses of the contributions of variables such as frequency of exposure to targeted clinical problems could inform the development and testing of appropriate individualized interventions to mitigate these threats to quality and safety of care.

MATERIALS/METHODS: Nine targeted clinical problems (TCP) were selected for further study, and de-identified, aggregated study data were obtained for one calendar year. Task analysis interviews of subspecialty physicians defined optimal management of each TCP and guided specification of quality of care metrics that could be extracted from the EHR. The Δ-t statistic, days since the provider's prior encounter with a given TCP, quantified frequency of exposure.

RESULTS

Frequency of patient encounters ranged from 1566 to 220,774 visits across conditions. Mean Δ-t ranged from 1.72days to 30.79days. Maximum Δ-t ranged from 285 to 497days. The distribution of Δ-t for the TCPs generally fit a Gamma distribution (P<0.001), indicating that Δ-t conforms to a Poisson process. A quality of care metric derived for each TCP declined progressively with increasing Δ-t for 8 of the 9 TCPs, affirming that knowledge decay was detectable from EHR data.

DISCUSSION/CONCLUSIONS: This project demonstrates the utility of the EHR as a research tool in studies of health care delivery in association with frequency of exposure of HCPs to TCPs. Subsequent steps in our research include multivariate modeling of clinical knowledge decay and randomized trials of pertinent preventive interventions.