A randomized controlled trial of a computer-based physician workstation in an outpatient setting: implementation barriers to outcome evaluation.

Objective: A research prototype Physician Workstation (PWS) incorporating a graphical user interface and a drug ordering module was compared with the existing hospital information system in an academic Veterans Administration General Medical Clinic. Physicians in the intervention group received recommendations for drug substitutions to reduce costs and were alerted to potential drug interactions. The objective was to evaluate the effect of the PWS on user satisfaction, on health-related outcomes, and on costs.

A randomized evaluation of a computer-based physician's workstation: design considerations and baseline results.

We are performing a randomized, controlled trial of a Physician's Workstation (PWS), an ambulatory care information system, developed for use in the General Medical Clinic (GMC) of the Palo Alto VA. Goals for the project include selecting appropriate outcome variables and developing a statistically powerful experimental design with a limited number of subjects. As PWS provides real-time drug-ordering advice, we retrospectively examined drug costs and drug-drug interactions in order to select outcome variables sensitive to our short-term intervention as well as to estimate the statistical efficiency of alternative design possibilities.