Integrating Patient Generated Family Health History From Varied Electronic Health Record (EHR) Entry Portals

Background: The long established wisdom of including family health history as a key part of an individual's medical record has been invigorated by the new emphasis on personalized medicine. While in the past, family health history was used to understand an individual's disease risk and to focus disease prevention efforts, in 21st century medicine, family health history's importance will increase as it will be essential to put detailed personal genetic information into a clinical context, namely the context of how the shared code has played out in a person's closest relatives. This new need for family health history will demand a more comprehensive family history dataset for all patients, and the time limitations faced by healthcare providers demand a technology-driven solution whereby the patient performs primary data entry and the provider then refines these data. Solutions do not currently exist by which most Americans can organize their family health history and then place it into their electronic health record (EHR). My Family Health Portrait (MFHP) is an open source, electronic family history collection tool developed by the Surgeon General that offers interoperability with EHRs, yet to our knowledge has not been widely integrated because of limitations in the capacity of many EHRs to accept these data, and barriers to the systematic collection of these data in clinical practice. Additionally, obstacles exist for those individuals who are not computer literate or do not have access to a home computer. In order to capture patient-generated family history data across diverse patient populations, EHR's may need to offer patients a variety of data entry options which allow for differences in preference, convenience, computer literacy, and computer availability. This proposal seeks to develop new resources for family history data entry into the EHR. These resources will be developed, tested and validated in a primary care setting within of a large complex healthcare system. Research Plan: The proposed project will examine the reach, effectiveness, adoption and implementation of three innovative portals to transfer and integrate patient generated family history data with an EHR. Specific Aim 1 (technical development) is to develop the three portals for entry of patient generated family history data integrated with an EHR. The pathways will include: : (1) computer tablets in waiting rooms to complete the MFHP, (2) a secure internet portal to transfer data collected by patients at home using MFHP, and (3) an interactive voice response (IVR) system to collect the necessary data elements by phone. Each of these modalities will interface with the EHR of a large health delivery system using current data standards. Each of these modalities will be designed to interface with the EHR of a large health delivery system using current data standards using current data standards. Specific Aim 2 (content development and validation) is to evaluate facilitators and barriers to the adoption, and implementation of these three electronic portals by assessing differences in patient preferences, privacy concerns, convenience, and understanding. The validity of the family history data collected by each of these three portals will also be assessed by a genetic counselor. Specific Aim 3 (pilot randomized controlled trial) is to conduct a 4-armed pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) to measure the reach and effectiveness of integrating this family history data with a patient's EHR. The trial will examine and compare changes in family history documentation, patient-doctor discussion of family history, and patient and provider satisfaction with each data entry portal described in Aim 1, as well as a control arm. The trial will be conducted as a pilot cluster RCT in selected practices within the Brigham and Women's Primary Care Practice-Based Research Network. Potential Impact: The impact of obtaining accurate family history data and integrating this with an individual's health record are substantial, and will be of growing importance as our understanding of the genome advances. This project will ultimately contribute to a better understanding of how available technologies can be integrated with EHR's to obtain accurate family history in ways that allow for widespread acquisition and integration of accurate family history data in a variety of settings and diverse patient populations. The technology and lessons learned from this project will be exportable to healthcare settings throughout the United States.