Interactive video specialty consultations in long-term care.

Objectives: To assess provider and resident satisfaction with and outcomes of specialist physician consultations provided via interactive video to residents of a long-term care (LTC) center.

Design: Cross-sectional survey.

Setting: Two Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (VAMC) and a state LTC center.

Email recruitment to use web decision support tools for pneumonia.

Application of guidelines to improve clinical decisions for Community Acquired Pneumonia (CAP) patients depends on accurate information about specific facts of each case and on presenting guideline support at the time decisions are being made. We report here on a system designed to solicit information from physicians about their CAP patients in order to classify CAP and present appropriate guidelines for type of care, length of stay, and use of antibiotics. We used elements of three existing information systems to create a achieve these goals: professionals coding diagnoses captured by the existing clinical information system (CIS), email, and web-based decision support tools including a pneumonia severity evaluation tool (SET).