Information standards for recording alcohol use in electronic health records: findings from a national consultation.

Background: Alcohol misuse is an important cause of premature disability and death. While clinicians are recommended to ask patients about alcohol use and provide brief interventions and specialist referral, this is poorly implemented in routine practice. We undertook a national consultation to ascertain the appropriateness of proposed standards for recording information about alcohol use in electronic health records (EHRs) in the UK and to identify potential barriers and facilitators to their implementation in practice.

Documenting Routinely What Matters to People: Standardized Headings for Health Records of Patients with Chronic Health Conditions.

Objective: Specifying the content in electronic health records (EHRs) through standardized headings based on international reference classifications will facilitate their semantic interoperability. The objective of this study was to specify potential chapter headings for EHRs aligned with the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) based on the perspectives of people living with chronic health conditions, carers, and professionals.

Methods: A multistage process was established including (1) a patient workshop, (2) an online survey of both patients and carers, and (3) an online consultation with patient and professional bodies.

What makes a good clinical app? Introducing the RCP Health Informatics Unit checklist.

Doctors increasingly rely on medical apps running on smart phones or tablet computers to support their work. However, these apps vary hugely in the quality of their data input screens, internal data processing, the methods used to handle sensitive patient data and how they communicate their output to the user. Inspired by Donabedian's approach to assessing quality and the principles of good user interface design, the Royal College of Physicians' Health Informatics Unit has developed and piloted an 18-item checklist to help clinicians assess the structure, functions and impact of medical apps.