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Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer Application in Medical Care logoLink to Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer Application in Medical Care
. 1995:693–697.

A randomized evaluation of a computer-based physician's workstation: design considerations and baseline results.

B L Rotman 1, A N Sullivan 1, T McDonald 1, P DeSmedt 1, D Goodnature 1, M Higgins 1, H J Suermondt 1, C Y Young 1, D K Owens 1
PMCID: PMC2579182  PMID: 8563376

Abstract

We are performing a randomized, controlled trial of a Physician's Workstation (PWS), an ambulatory care information system, developed for use in the General Medical Clinic (GMC) of the Palo Alto VA. Goals for the project include selecting appropriate outcome variables and developing a statistically powerful experimental design with a limited number of subjects. As PWS provides real-time drug-ordering advice, we retrospectively examined drug costs and drug-drug interactions in order to select outcome variables sensitive to our short-term intervention as well as to estimate the statistical efficiency of alternative design possibilities. Drug cost data revealed the mean daily cost per physician per patient was 99.3 cents +/- 13.4 cents, with a range from 0.77 cent to 1.37 cents. The rate of major interactions per prescription for each physician was 2.9% +/- 1%, with a range from 1.5% to 4.8%. Based on these baseline analyses, we selected a two-period parallel design for the evaluation, which maximized statistical power while minimizing sources of bias.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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