Distribution of a primary care office information system

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Primary Care Medicine
• Web-based Health Information Systems

Background:

• Primary Care Office InSite (PCOI) is a successful web-based intranet application at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).
• PCOI provides readily accessible clinical practice guidelines, patient educational materials, drug information, and referral resources for routine patient care.
• Over 1600 users logged 60,000 sessions in the past year, indicating significant internal utilization.

Purpose of the Study:

• To discuss the challenges and lessons learned from disseminating the PCOI application to four distinct external ambulatory care sites.
• To evaluate the feasibility of sharing a developed intranet resource across different healthcare settings lacking internal development resources.

Main Methods:

• An ongoing experiment involving the dissemination of the PCOI web application via the Internet.
• Target sites included a rural community hospital, a city-wide health care network, an inner-city general hospital, and an Indian Health Service hospital.
• Focus on identifying problems encountered during the dissemination process.

Main Results:

• The study details the specific problems encountered during the internet-based dissemination of PCOI.
• Lessons learned are documented, providing insights into the complexities of sharing such a resource.
• The diverse nature of the four recipient sites highlights varying challenges in adoption and integration.

Conclusions:

• Disseminating a developed intranet application like PCOI to external sites requires addressing unique logistical and technical challenges.
• The lessons learned are crucial for future efforts to share valuable primary care resources across different healthcare infrastructures.
• External sites without internal development capacity can benefit from such shared applications, provided dissemination challenges are managed.