Improving Otitis Media Care With Clinical Decision Support

Context The high prevalence of Otitis Media (OM) and its enormous cost make it a prime target for cost-effective and evidence-based strategies for disease management.

Objectives

This protocol will prospectively develop a new electronic health record (EHR)-based health information technology (IT) intervention that a) summarizes OM care into clinically meaningful episodes-of-care, b) provides clinical decision support based upon evidence-based guidelines to primary care and ENT physicians working within an integrated physician network that uses a common EHR, and c) tests the additive effects on quality and resource utilization of providing feedback to physicians. The specific aims are:

Aim 1: To develop and pilot test the OM health IT intervention; Aim 2: To examine the overall effect of the health IT intervention and the independent contribution of physician feedback on quality of OM care (primary outcomes); Aim 3: To assess the effects of the intervention on the secondary outcomes of health care resource utilization and clinician adoption of the health IT.

Study Design/Settings/Participants A cluster randomized trial and multi-level statistical modeling will be used to estimate health IT intervention effects on study outcomes. The proposed project will be conducted in the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's (CHOP) health care system. The heath IT intervention will be tested in the Pediatric Research Consortium (PeRC), which includes 28 primary care practices in the CHOP network, both urban and suburban, and the CHOP ENT clinical sites. Randomization and implementation of the intervention will occur at the practice level. Study outcomes of quality of care and resource utilization will be reported at the levels of the practice, individual practitioner, and episode-of-care (patient-level).

Study Measures Our main study measures include the quality of otitis media care provided during episodes of OM.

Our secondary outcomes include measurement of clinician adoption of the health IT intervention and resource use.

Inclusion criteria

• All CHOP primary care pediatric and ENT practice sites are eligible for inclusion in this study. We expect 35,000 patients to receive care for otitis media by CHOP clinicians at these sites during the study period however, they are not the subjects of this research.

Exclusion criteria

• There are no exclusion criteria. All CHOP primary care pediatric and ENT sites are eligible for participation. Data for all clinicians providing OM care and data on all OM encounters will be included in our data set.