Identifying patients with ischaemic heart disease in general practice: cross sectional study of paper and computerised medical records

• HIT Description: Electronic health record and data collection/summary. More info...
  
• Purpose of Study: Identify patients with ischemic heart disease by using a practice computer and to estimate the work required to do so.
  
• Years of study: Not Available
  
• Study Design: Cross-sectional
  
• Outcomes: Impact on health care effectivness/quality
  

• Settings: Eleven general practices, and 1680 patients in the Battersea primary care group in South London participated in the study.
• Intervention: A database was built from data from the notes and from the computer records of patients, which was used to compare different methods of identifying patients with ischemic heart disease.
• Evaluation Method: Measure of numbers of patients identified with ischemic heart disease.
• Quality of Care and Patient Safety Outcome: The combination of the Read code for ischemic heart disease (G3) and a prescription for a nitrate had 73% sensitivity and a yield (100/positive predictive value) of one case of ischemic heart disease for every 1.2 sets of notes reviewed. By searching the records of patients also receiving aspirin, atenolol, digoxin, or a statin, the sensitivity was increased to 96% but the yield fell to one in three.