There were two major objectives for this project: (1) to identify barriers and facilitators to workflow integration of clinical decision support (CDS) for colorectal cancer screening and 2) to prototype and test CDS design alternatives for improved integration into workflow through a controlled simulation study.

Principal Investigators: Pascale Carayon and Ben-Tzion Karsh (Contract No. 290-08-10036) This toolkit helps provider offices assess their worksflows before, during, and after the implementation of a health IT system.

The AHRQ Health Information Technology Portfolio's 2010 Annual Report is designed to disseminate information on the research areas and progress at both the Portfolio and individual project levels. The report describes activities that took place throughout the year and synthesizes challenges, outputs, and successes of the 180 active projects. In addition, as part of the report, an individual project summary for each of the 121 grants and 59 contracts provides an overview of each project's long term objectives, status updates of the specific aims and objectives, and updates on completed or ongoing project activities.

This project report for Medicaid-SCHIP details whether and how health information technology (health IT) and the Medicaid EHR incentive program can be used as tools to improve access to quality oral health care for children enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

E-prescribing systems can provide physicians access to important patient information, such as drugs prescribed by physicians in other practices and formulary information that can help reduce insured patients’ drug costs, but many physicians are reluctant to use these features because they are viewed as cumbersome and unreliable, according to a new report funded by HHS' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The report, prepared for AHRQ by researchers at the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC), is a qualitative study of 24 physician practices using e-prescribing systems. Study respondents highlighted two barriers to use: 1) tools to view and use the patient health information are cumbersome to use in some systems; and 2) data are not always seen as useful enough to expend the extra effort to use them. For more information about the HSC Research Brief, go to http://www.hschange.org/CONTENT/1202/.

A new AHRQ funded-report examines the impact of human factors on home health care quality and safety. Based on proceedings from an October 2009 workshop, the report, "The Role of Human Factors in Home Healthcare: Workshop Summary and Papers," includes seven commissioned papers and discussion summaries on how home care quality and safety is impacted by the capabilities and limitations of patients and providers in the use of technologies. The workshop summary report, published by the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council is available at The National Academies Press' Web site. A final consensus report and designers' guide for home-based consumer health IT developers are under development and expected to be released in Spring 2011.