Apr 27, 2009 - Boston, MA – Although the dangers of smoking are well known, tobacco still remains the number one cause of preventable death in the United States. The US Public Health Service recommends that physicians ask all patients about their tobacco use and connect them to cessation services, but there are still many patients who are never asked about their smoking habits. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that by enhancing the electronic health record, physicians were more likely to document a patient’s smoking habit and that access to cessation counseling was improved. This research is published April 27, 2009 in the Archives of Internal Medicine - http://archinte.ama-
“As the use of the electronic health record expands, so does the opportunity to use it to improve patient care and delivery. In our study, we found that an enhancement in the electronic health record is a successful tool to remind clinicians to ask patients about smoking status and refer smokers for cessation counseling” said Jeffrey Linder, MD, MPH, a physician and researcher at BWH and lead author of the study.
Linder and colleagues developed an electronic health record enhancement to increase documentation of smoking status, the prescription of tobacco treatment medications and referral of patients to tobacco treatment counseling. This study was performed in 26 primary care practices which were randomized to be intervention practices and have the enhancement implemented in their electronic health record system or be a control practice without the enhanced electronic medical record. Over a period of nine months, more than 315,000 patient visits were made to the participating practices.
Researchers found that documentation of a patients smoking status in the health record was improved in all participating practices, but intervention practices had a higher increase, a 17 percent increase compared to 11 percent in control practices. They also found that in practices with the intervention, patients who were documented smokers at the start of the study were more likely to be non-smokers at the end of the study (a 3.4 percent increase in documented non-smokers)
“Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States and more research is needed to maximize the utilization of health information technology to streamline tobacco treatment efforts by clinicians,”
This research was funded by a grant from the National Cancer Institute and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality - http://www.ahrq.gov/
