Physicians' use of computerized clinical decision supports to improve medication management in the elderly - the Seniors Medication Alert and Review Technology intervention.

Background: Elderly people (aged 65 years or more) are at increased risk of polypharmacy (five or more medications), inappropriate medication use, and associated increased health care costs. The use of clinical decision support (CDS) within an electronic medical record (EMR) could improve medication safety.

Methods: Participatory action research methods were applied to preproduction design and development and postproduction optimization of an EMR-embedded CDS implementation of the Beers' Criteria for medication management and the Cockcroft-Gault formula for estimating glomerular filtration rates (GFR).

Predicting information preferences from information logs.

This poster describes questions that can be answered about how clinical and knowledge-based resources are used in an integrated information environment that track how diverse applications are initiated, given focus, interacted with, and linked to other applications. Results show that it is possible to use decision trees to predict information patterns and preferences.

Patterns of use of decision support tools by clinicians.

This paper analyses information behavior data automatically gathered by an integrated clinical information environment used by internal medicine physicians and trainees at the University of Alberta. The study reviews how clinical information systems, decision-support tools and evidence resources were used over a 13 month period. Aggregate and application-specific frequency and duration of use was compared for location, time of day, physician status, and application-type (clinical information system or 5 categories of knowledge resources).