A Step Toward Identifying Sources of Medical Errors: Modeling Standards of Care Deviations for Different Disease States.

Objective: To examine the feasibility of utilizing electronic health records (EHR) to determine a metric for identifying physician diagnostic and treatment deviations in standards of care for different disease states.

Methods: A Boolean-rule-based model compared deviations in standards of care across four disease states: diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis. This metric was used to identify the relationship between physician deviations in standards of care procedures, before and after diagnosis, for 76 internal medicine physicians.