May 23, 2014 – Professor Laura Fochtmann, MD, MBI made two presentations at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New York, NY earlier this month.
The first summarized the findings of a survey that Dr. Fochtmann and her colleagues conducted to gather information about the kinds of clinical questions psychiatrists want answered in the context of delivering care and how comfortable psychiatrists are using computer-based resources to answer them. One hundred and fifty-two practicing psychiatrists responded to the survey. More than a third of the questions they sought answers for related to medication treatments. An additional quarter related to broader aspects of treatment and clinical management. Other types of questions, including those related to diagnosis, were less common.
Although more than 90% of respondents said that they are comfortable using computers for personal or educational purposes, only 74% reported being comfortable using them in clinical contexts. The differences in comfort with computers were most striking for psychiatrists over age 55. The findings suggest that psychiatrists are generally comfortable using computers but that improvements are needed to make informational resources such as practice guidelines more usable at the point of care.
Farifteh Duffy, Robert Kunkle and William Narrow collaborated in the study and presentation, which was titled “Building User-Friendly Practice Guidelines: Lessons Learned From Practicing Psychiatrists’ Use of Clinical Information Resources.”
The other presentation, titled “Can Open Source Software Help Meet the Health IT Privacy Challenge?”, was prepared by Robert M. Kolodner, MD who had a last minute conflict. It addressed the ways that open source software can enable patients to determine who can access the segments of their health care data that they view as particularly sensitive.