Joel Buchanan, MD, professor (CHS), General Internal Medicine, has been awarded $50,000 over one year from the UW Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) for a Novel Methods pilot grant. The project aims to reduce the challenges of retrieving and organizing clinical information in electronic health record (EHR) systems.

The grant proposal title is "Evaluation of the Impact of a Problem Oriented View on Clinical Workflows." The study will evaluate an automatic tool called Problem Oriented View, or POV, that can aggregate data and create context-dependent views within EHR systems.

This pilot project will evaluate the impact of the POV tool to assess whether its implementation reduces time to case completion, increases accuracy of information retrieval, reduces cognitive workload of clinicians, and improves physician satisfaction relative to control EHR users who do not use the POV.

The essential component of the POV is the Problem Concept Map (PCM), which links conditions and disease states to relevant information in the EHR. The long-term goal of Dr. Buchanan and colleagues is to create a center at UW-Madison that maintains and curates a set of PCMs.