Front-Line Physicians' Satisfaction with Information Systems in Hospitals

Day-to-day operations management in hospital units is difficult due to continuously varying situations, several actors involved and a vast number of information systems in use. The aim of this study was to describe front-line physicians' satisfaction with existing information systems needed to support the day-to-day operations management in hospitals. A cross-sectional survey was used and data chosen with stratified random sampling were collected in nine hospitals. Data were analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistical methods. The response rate was 65 % (n = 111). The physicians reported that information systems support their decision making to some extent, but they do not improve access to information nor are they tailored for physicians. The respondents also reported that they need to use several information systems to support decision making and that they would prefer one information system to access important information. Improved information access would better support physicians' decision making and has the potential to improve the quality of decisions and speed up the decision making process.Peer reviewe

Building a Knowledge-Based Tool for Auto-Assessing the Cardiovascular Risk

International audienceThe prevention of cardiovascular diseases needs first to quantify the cardiovascular risk. To estimate this risk, French national health authorities provided clinical practice guidelines extending the existing European SCORE, which doesn't include all the cardiovascular risk factors (e.g. diabetes). Hence, French national clinical practice guidelines to quantify the cardiovascular risk is able to deal with more clinical situations than the SCORE. The goal of this paper is to formalize knowledge extracted from these guidelines and implement the rules so that they can be used into an auto-assessing tool of cardiovascular risk. Formalization followed five steps and was conducted under the guidance of medical experts. It resulted into a decision tree fed by eight decision variables. Evaluation of the accuracy of the decision tree showed 80% of agreement with an expert in medical informatics in predicting the cardiovascular risk level for 15 different clinical situations. Discrepancies correspond to the knowledge gaps within Clinical Practice Guidelines. We intend to extend the implementation of the decision tree to a complete tool, for allowing patient to auto-assess their cardiovascular risk. This tool will be integrated into a platform providing recommendations adapted to the calculated level of cardiovascular risk