About the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital Pilot Site Project
Project Lead: Monica Overby
Testing the use of innovative technology to accurately interpret unstructured provider notes, specifically, the medical decision making (MDM) portion of the electronic health records, to obtain insight into the cognitive aspects of the diagnostic process. If methods are found to be reliable, the team hopes to then validate them to screen large numbers of electronic health records (EHRs) to investigate the epidemiology and derive interventions to mitigate diagnostic errors in the context of acute care. The MDM portion of the EHR is the only surrogate that captures the cognitive aspects of decision making. UM sought to field test a highly-limited scope intervention in the form of a scripted, structured patient problem representation statement template to increase the influence of System 2 (slow thinking) over System 1 (fast thinking) and thus potentially reduce diagnostic mishaps. This is meant to demonstrate that by structuring the MDM of the pediatric emergency department visit notes in a certain way through a template, the team could potentially influence, affect, or at least better monitor the “in the moment” diagnostic decision-making process of a pediatric emergency department patient encounter.