Evaluation of Alerts in Promoting Bone Densitometry Scans

Evaluation of Best Practice Alerts and an Actionable Sidebar in Electronic Health Records in Promoting Bone Densitometry Scans

The purpose of this study is to assess, prospectively, the effect of provider-facing alerts for bone densitometry scans with and without a single-click best practice alert (BPA) on scan orders and completions. The investigators hypothesize that the remaining alerts left in place (via health maintenance topics and an actionable item in the electronic health record sidebar) will be as effective without the BPA compared to the alerts with a BPA.

Standard care for bone densitometry scans at Geisinger--i.e., dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scans--involves (1) an alert under the health maintenance topics tab in Epic, (2) an actionable item in a sidebar (Storyboard), (3) and a single-click best practice alert (BPA). Storyboard and the BPA theoretically serve a redundant function, but it is possible that combined alerting is effective. Therefore, the investigators plan to evaluate whether the BPA for DXA scans will increase the percentage of DXA scans ordered and completed. For this evaluation, the investigators will randomly assign (by odd and even MRN) half of patients who need DXA scans to go through standard care (including the single-click BPA) and half of patients to have no BPA shown to their provider, but only the health maintenance topic and actionable Storyboard alert. This evaluation will help the investigators determine whether redundant, more traditional alerts such as BPAs are helpful or can be removed from alerts for DXA scans. The randomization of patients to different alert conditions will be in place until 4,200 participants have been reached (estimated sample to detect 4% absolute difference, rounded to nearest hundred) or 6 months, whichever comes first. To account for delays in updating clinical databases, the outcome data will pulled 3 months after each encounter (for a maximum study period of 9 months). The main analysis will use a logistic regression to compare the two groups. Exploratory analyses will also examine the time from order to completion to examine any effect on timing between arms. Another set of exploratory analyses will also examine the number of other BPAs firing to see if alert fatigue influenced the number of orders or completions or interacted with the experimental conditions.

The participants and providers will not know that alerts were randomized. Participants will not know the arm to which they were assigned. Providers might notice that a given participant did or did not receive a certain alert, but this is expected to be unlikely, given the volume of alerts to which providers are exposed constantly.

A health maintenance topic, actionable sidebar item, and a single-click best practice alert are presented.

A health maintenance topic and an actionable sidebar item are presented. The best practice alert is set to be silent and will not appear in the patient's chart.

Inclusion Criteria: In primary care Records indicate patient is due for a bone densitometry scan (generally, a high-risk patient that requires this scan or age 65 and older) Exclusion Criteria: Encounters at clinics/sites where the randomization build cannot easily be deployed

Data with no personally identifiable information will be made available to other researchers on the Open Science Framework for transparency. This will include the essential data and code needed to replicate the analysis that yielded reported findings. The PI did not examine or analyze any data from this study prior to this registration.

The data will become available after publication of study results in a scientific journal and will be available as long as the Open Science Framework hosts the data.