***TASK*** the task is to summarize an input biomedical literature in six sentences 
    ***INPUT*** the input is a biomedical literature 
    ***OUTPUT*** the output is the summary of an input biomedical literature in six sentences 
    ***DOCUMENTATION*** 
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    Input: OBJECTIVE To study the effect of a computerized medical record and other practice factors on the delivery of preventive health care . DESIGN Prospect i ve , controlled trial . SETTING University general internal medicine teaching clinic . PARTICIPANTS Forty-five internal medicine residents and their 4 supervising attending physicians . INTERVENTION The study group used a computerized ambulatory medical record system that included health care maintenance reminders . The control group used a conventional paper record with a health care maintenance flow sheet . MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS The computer reminders significantly increased health care maintenance recommendations made to patients for proctosigmoidoscopy , tetanus vaccination , influenza vaccination , and pneumococcal vaccination , but not for fecal occult blood testing , mammography , Pap smears , or serum thyroxine screening in the elderly . First-year residents were nearly twice as successful as third-year residents in overall health care maintenance . Success scores varied markedly depending on which attending physician was supervising the residents . We found a strong interaction among group assignment , supervising attending , and level of training such that the reminders doubled success scores among first-year residents supervised by two of the attending physicians but had little effect on other subgroups . The time of year and the format of the reminder also had important effects for some of the maneuvers . CONCLUSIONS Although computerized medical records markedly improved the performance of prevention maneuvers by committed physicians , many physicians using computer systems failed to make use of the re source . The reasons for this were complex . Future work in this area should carefully control for personal behaviors and focus upon administrative changes that more effectively implement these potentially powerful tools Advance directives name a surrogate decision maker or provide written instructions with the intent of extending patient autonomy with respect to end-of-life decisions [ 1 - 3 ] . Supported on various grounds by the public [ 1 ] , physicians [ 4 ] , ethicists [ 5 ] , and legislators [ 6 ] , advance directives have also been promoted as a way to control the high costs of health care at the end of life [ 7 , 8 ] . Most patients are interested in establishing advance directives , but few actually complete them [ 1 , 9 , 10 ] . In 1990 , the U.S. Congress passed the Patient Self-Determination Act , which requires hospitals to inform admitted patients about their right to record advance directives [ 6 , 11 ] . The Act does not dictate who should initiate these discussion s ( patients , physicians , or an admissions officer , for example ) [ 12 , 13 ] . It is therefore not surprising that the Act has had little effect on the rate of completion of advance directives [ 11 , 13 - 15 ] . Because hospitalized patients are often acutely ill and lose their ability to make decisions [ 3 ] , it may be more appropriate to discuss such issues before hospitalization [ 12 , 16 , 17 ] . Other interventions aim ed at increasing the establishment of advance directives have met with mixed success [ 18 ] . With one exception [ 19 ] , patient education has had little or no effect [ 20 - 24 ] . More effective interventions have trained physicians , social workers , or counselors to discuss advance directives [ 18 , 22 , 25 - 27 ] ; this has led to the conclusion that counseling by a clinician is the best catalyst for the completion of advance directives [ 28 ] . However , little is known about how to educate and motivate clinicians to solicit advance directives [ 28 ] . We [ 29 - 31 ] and others [ 32 ] have previously shown that computer reminders increase physician compliance with practice guidelines . In this study , we tested the hypothesis that reminding primary care physicians to discuss advance directives would stimulate such discussion s and lead to the establishment of more advance directives . Methods Setting and Patients This study was approved by the institutional review board of Indiana University as expedited research with waiver of informed consent from both patients and physicians . It was conducted in the General Medicine Practice [ 31 ] , an academic primary care practice affiliated with an urban public teaching hospital . This practice is staffed by general internal medicine faculty , fellows , and residents . Each resident and fellow attends the General Medicine Practice one half-day per week ; faculty attend one to four half-days per week . Residents always practice with the same attending faculty physicians . All physicians , except for study investigators , were eligible to participate . At the time of this study , the General Medicine Practice comprised four separate practice s with separate waiting areas , clerks , and nurses . Each practice held eight half-day sessions per week . Each session was attended by two faculty members and two or three residents , each of whom provided primary care to assigned panels of patients . Residents were required to briefly discuss each patient with the attending faculty . Fellows served as faculty and were treated as such . Since 1981 , a computerized program has r and omly assigned new physicians to the practice sessions [ 31 ] . New patients have been sequentially assigned to open appointment slots ; this result ed in no important differences in patients or clinical practice among the sessions [ 29 , 33 ] . We included patients who were at risk for acute deterioration ( and therefore might benefit from advance directives ) because of advanced age ( 75 years , the typical threshold for the oldest old ) or because they were 50 years of age or older and had one of the following chronic conditions : cardiac ischemia , heart failure , chronic lung disease , cancer other than nonmelanomatous skin cancer , cerebrovascular disease , renal insufficiency , or cirrhosis . We chose 50 years of age as a cut-off to yield sufficient numbers of patients . A computer program identified eligible patients among those with scheduled appointments at the General Medicine Practice by using problem lists and test results stored in the Regenstrief Medical Record System [ 34 ] . Eligible patients who kept appointments at the General Medicine Practice were approached by research assistants in the waiting room . The research assistants , who were blinded at all times to the patients ' study groups , explained the study to the patients , invited them to participate , and interviewed those who agreed to participate ; patients from nursing homes and prisons and patients who were deaf or did not speak English were excluded . The assistants then administered the Pfeiffer Mental Status Question naire [ 35 ] ; patients whose scores indicated cognitive dysfunction were excluded . The remaining patients provided sociodemographic information and stated whether they had previously discussed or completed advance directives ; patients who had completed advance directives were excluded . Patients also stated their preferences with regard to six treatments in the event of a terminal illness [ 36 ] . Advance Directives Before the study , we created two separate forms for instruction directives and proxy directives ; these forms became the official advance directive documents of the hospital and its outpatient services . The instruction directive allowed patients to indicate whether , in the event of terminal illness and mental incapacity , they wanted or did not want eight types of care : cardiopulmonary resuscitation , mechanical ventilation , surgery , invasive procedures , nutrition and hydration , transfusion of blood or blood products , antibiotics , or noninvasive diagnostic tests . The primary care physician had to sign each completed instruction directive form to indicate that he or she was aware of its contents . The proxy directive design ated both primary and secondary health care representatives . We placed both advance directive forms in a drawer of the desk of each physician in the General Medicine Practice . We also placed the forms in a bin near the door of the staff room along with other forms and requisitions and business reply envelopes for patients who wanted to complete the forms at home . Research assistants entered the data from completed forms into the Regenstrief Medical Record System , where the forms were available for viewing through computer terminals and workstations in all inpatient and outpatient venues [ 34 ] . Before the study , the three physician-investigators presented the basic concepts of advance directives at gr and rounds . They also had face-to-face meetings with each physician in the General Medicine Practice and explained how to complete and process the forms . We encouraged physicians to discuss advance directives with their elderly and debilitated patients and posted flyers in each practice staffing room suggesting that physicians discuss advance directives with patients who had the target study conditions . Study Methods The intent of the r and omization scheme was to expose physicians to the same type of reminder or reminders , or no reminders , during all of their scheduled primary care visits with enrolled patients . At the time of this study , 32 weekly half-day sessions took place on the four General Medicine Practice practice s. Two sessions attended by study investigators were excluded . We r and omly assigned all of the physicians who worked in a particular half-day session to the same reminder category . At the time of r and omization , 16 physicians ( all of whom were faculty members ) practice d in more than 1 session per week ( 14 practice d in 2 sessions and 2 practice d in 3 sessions ) . Therefore , we r and omly assigned the sessions in a stepped manner by first allocating the 16 physicians and all of their associated sessions to four categories : control ( no reminders ) , computer-generated reminders for instruction directives , computer-generated reminders for proxy directives , and computer-generated reminders for both types of directives . We then r and omly assigned the remaining 8 sessions and their physicians to the four categories ( Table 1 ) . Each practice contained sessions in all four categories , which were equally distributed between mornings and afternoons . Table 1 . Results of R and omization All physicians routinely received computer-generated reminders for patients with scheduled visits . They were reminded to give preventive care , note abnormal test results , and avoid drug interactions [ 29 , 34 ] . These reminders appeared at the bottom of computer-generated printed encounter forms [ 34 ] ( Figure 1 ) . Physicians routinely review ed the encounter forms and the practice chart immediately before visiting the patient . As recommended by Litzelman and coworkers [ 37 ] , the advance directive reminders were followed by a choice list ( discussed today , next visit , not applicable , patient too ill , patient refuses to discuss , I disagree with advance directives ) . Instruction directives were called advance directives , and proxies were called health care representatives ( Figure 1 ) . Figure 1 . General Medicine Practice encounter form showing reminders for both types of advance directive . After patients were enrolled , research assistants attempted to interview them in the waiting room after each scheduled appointment to assess whether they had discussed advance directives with their physicians that day . Patients who answered yes were defined as having had an advance directive discussion . During the first scheduled General Medicine Practice visit in the 5-month period between 11 and 16 months after enrollment , a close-out interview was attempted . If no scheduled visit had occurred by 15 months after enrollment , the close-out interview was attempted by telephone . Form completion was defined as having occurred if either completed form was received between study enrollment and 30 days after the final interview ( this made it possible to receive by mail forms that were completed after the close-out BACKGROUND We compared the efficacy of a computer-generated prompt sheet placed on the front of patients ' charts with a patient-carried prompt card to remind physicians to perform selected health maintenance items . METHODS A r and omized prospect i ve single-blind study was performed in private practice offices in rural eastern North Carolina , with 28 family practitioners and nine general internists participating . Twenty-two physicians were r and omized to the computer prompt group and 22 to the card prompt group .  Four physicians in the computer group did not complete the study because of computer software problems , and three physicians did not complete the study because their limited staff was unable to enter patient data into the computer . Before the intervention , 20 patient charts ( 10 males and 10 females ) from each physician were audited for the performance of influenza vaccinations , stool for occult blood , pap smears , breast examinations performed by the physicians , and mammograms . One year after the intervention was instituted , chart audits for the above five items were done again on 20 different patient charts for each physician . RESULTS There was a 7 % increase in the performance of influenza vaccinations  in the card group ( 17 % vs 24 % ) compared with a 6 % increase in the computer group ( 20 % vs 26 % ) . There was a 5 % decrease in the performance of stool for occult blood in the card group ( 28 % vs 23 % ) compared with a 1 % increase in the computer group ( 30 % vs 31 % ) . There was an 11 % decrease in the performance of pap smears in the card group ( 26 % vs 15 % ) compared with a 3 % increase in the computer group ( 23 % vs 26 % ) . There was a 2 % decrease in the performance of breast examinations by the physician in the card group ( 35 % vs 33 % ) compared with a 3 % increase in the computer group ( 30 % vs 33 % ) . Finally , there was a 3 % increase in the performance of mammograms in the card group ( 22 % vs 25 % ) compared with an 11 % increase in the computer group ( 15 % vs 26 % ) . CONCLUSIONS Our data show a greater increase in performance of health maintenance items in the computer-prompted group . The performance of stool for occult blood , pap smears , breast examinations performed by the physician , and mammograms were increased more in the computer-prompted group than in the card group . However , there was not a statistically significant difference after intervention for any of the audited health maintenance items for either the computer group or the card group . Overall , health maintenance measures were performed in only a minority of appropriate patients Computers are steadily being incorporated in clinical practice . We conducted a nonr and omised , controlled , prospect i ve trial of electronic messages design ed to enhance adherence to clinical practice guidelines . We studied 126 physicians and nurse practitioners who used electronic medical records when caring for 349 patients with HIV infection in a primary care practice . We analysed the response times of clinicians to the situations that triggered alerts and reminders , the number of ambulatory visits , and hospitalisation . The median response times to 303 alerts in the intervention group and 388 alerts in the control group were 11 and 52 days ( p < 0.0001 ) , respectively . The median response time to 432 reminders in the inter 
    Output:
    
Communication services were present most often in systems integrated with electronic medical records .