Infobuttons at Intermountain Healthcare: utilization and infrastructure

"Infobuttons" have been proposed as a potential solution for lowering access barriers to on-line information resources at the point-of-care. At Intermountain Healthcare, infobuttons have been available to clinicians for over 4 years. The current implementation of infobuttons is based on a software component called "E-resources Manager,' allowing new infobuttons to be configured without requiring any programming. Infobuttons are implemented in the problem list, laboratory results, and medication order entry modules of HELP2, our web-based Clinical Information System. During the past four years, infobuttons were used 53,127 times by 2,611 unique users. Medication order entry infobuttons were the most commonly used. The continuous growth in use since the initial release confirms the usefulness of infobuttons. However, additional research and development is still needed before full benefits can be achieved within all our clinical systems.