The impact of anticipatory patient data displays on physician decision making: a pilot study

Computerized patient records have long offered the promise of facilitated access to patient data for clinical decision-making. Nonetheless, the decision process benefits of improved patient data access have been poorly quantified by prior informatics research. We conducted a pilot study to test the feasibility of study methods and gather data for the planning of a future clinical trial designed to assess the impact of patient data summary displays on serum lipid test interpretation time, on targeted data retrieval time for related data, and on decision quality. The pilot demonstrated feasibility and high face validity of the decision-making simulation methods used. Problem-focused patient data summaries appear to reduce time-based decision performance measures by 40-50%, and may improve decision quality even without the inclusion of knowledge-based recommendations or guideline representations.