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General practitioners' perceptions of the pharmaceutical decision-support tools in their prescribing software
Michael D Ahearn1, Stephen J Kerr
1National Prescribing Service, Level 1, 31 Buckingham Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010, Australia. mahearn@nps.org.au
Objectives:
To explore how Australian general practitioners use pharmaceutical decision-support (PDS) systems; to determine GPs' perceptions of the deficiencies and strengths of these systems; and how they believe they can be improved.
Design And Setting:
Qualitative analysis of discussion from three focus groups of GPs (from one rural and two urban Divisions of General Practice) between April and May 2002.
Participants:
22 GPs selected to include users of the five most popular prescribing/clinical practice software products available in Australia.
Main Outcome Measures:
Advantages and disadvantages of using PDS software; ideas for improving PDS systems; attitudes to electronic evidence-based guidelines.
Results:
GPs believed that important interactions may be missed because of desensitisation resulting from too many alerts (which also intrude on workflow); that interaction alerts need to be severity graded and only significant ones should appear; and that improved computer-user interface design could enhance the usefulness of PDS systems.
Conclusions:
Our results will provide useful feedback to government, software vendors and software developers on the needs and expectations of end users and on the development of agreed software standards.