RECORD: RELIABLE ELECTRONIC CAPTURE OF RELEVANT DATA

Children'S Hospital Boston, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

Current use of electronic medical records in health care creates barriers between the patient as a provider of information and the creation of the health record. This proposal will be executed within the NLM-funded PING (Personal Internetworked Notary and Guardian) project. The specific aims are: 1) to design a web- based tool to enable parents' direct report of historical data into the electronic medical record, and 2) to measure the quality of medical histories entered by a parent for his/her child. I will develop and test this informational tool in two stages. First, an iterative process to study the quantity and quality of information gathered from user-interfaces of varying structures will occur. User feedback on the interface will be combined with content analysis of acquired information to produce a comprehensive interview covering five common symptoms experienced by a parent/child dyad in an acute illness visit. The interview will be deployed and tested in stage two. Validity will be measured by percent agreement between the parent-generated record and the final physician-generated record. Item-specific disagreement will be further studied to test the hypothesis that parental report will emphasize a higher level of symptom acuity than that reflected in the physician's charting.