Design and implementation of a clinical rule editor for chronic disease reminders in an electronic medical record

Clinical reminders have well-documented benefits in improving quality of care. Once clinicians approve evidence-based rules, they should be quickly implemented. However, most of the reminders in our home-grown EMR historically were hard-coded, making it difficult to maintain old rules and implement new ones. We designed a web-based editor to make rule logic readable and editable by non-programmers. We hope to decrease the turnaround time of reminder authoring and maintenance, thereby improving quality of care.