Factors Affecting Cognition and Depression in Adult Patients with Epilepsy.

Background And Purpose: Epilepsy patients are more likely to experience depressive symptoms and cognitive impairment compared to individuals in the general population. As the reasons for this are not definitively known, we sought to determine what factors correlate most strongly with cognition and a screening test for depression in epilepsy patients.

Methods: Our study population included 379 adult patients diagnosed with epilepsy or seizure in our neurology clinic.

Structured clinical documentation in the electronic medical record to improve quality and to support practice-based research in epilepsy.

Objective: Using the electronic medical record (EMR) to capture structured clinical data at the point of care would be a practical way to support quality improvement and practice-based research in epilepsy.

Methods: We describe our stepwise process for building structured clinical documentation support tools in the EMR that define best practices in epilepsy, and we describe how we incorporated these toolkits into our clinical workflow.

Results: These tools write notes and capture hundreds of fields of data including several score tests: Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 items, Neurological Disorders Depression Inventory for Epilepsy, Epworth Sleepiness Scale, Quality of Life in Epilepsy-10 items, Montreal Cognitive Assessment/Short Test of Mental Status, and Medical Research Council Prognostic Index.