Implementing clinical guidelines in the treatment of hypertension in general practice. Evaluation of patient outcome related to implementation of a computer-based clinical decision support system

• HIT Description: Electronic health record and computerized decision support with guidelines. More info...
  
• Purpose of Study: Assess a computer-based clinical decision support system with guidelines to treat hypertension.
  
• Years of study: Not Available
  
• Study Design: RCT
  
• Outcomes: Impact on health care effectivness/quality
  

• Settings: General practices in Sor- and Nord-Trondelag counties in Norway, with 380,000 inhabitants participated in the study.
• Intervention: A group of health centers using a computer-based clinical decision support system (CDSS) with clinical guidelines for hypertension (doctors received baseline registrations with information of how they treated their own patients) were compared to a control group.
• Evaluation Method: Measures of patient outcomes (systolic and diastolic blood pressure, serum cholesterol, body mass index, risk score for myocardial infarction, and differences in fractions of smokers).
• Quality of Care and Patient Safety Outcome: Significant group difference in favor of intervention group: diastolic blood pressure 1 mmHg (95% CI -1.89, -0.17). Also, significant baseline difference in systolic blood pressure in favor of control group of 2.7 mmHg (95% CI 1.0, 4.5) had been reduced to 1.2 mmHg (95% CI -0.6, 3.0) after intervention. There were no significant differences between the groups for the rest of the outcomes.