查看文章

Methods

We administered an exit survey to patients in the family medicine clinic at a large academic medical center in central Virginia from July to August of 2005. Physicians in the clinic had begun using tablet computers as part of a pilot program for a system-wide EHR 1 week prior to this survey, and thus the patients surveyed were exposed to physician use of the tablets at the beginning of the implementation process. Previously, physicians did not have computers in the examination rooms other than PDAs.

Patients were selected to receive the survey at random (using a random number generator) from a register of all the patients seen in the practice each day except that, to ensure an even distribution of patients across physicians, the number of patients surveyed who were seen by any one physician was limited to 10. Visits in which the patient was seen either by a nurse practitioner