Medical Gopher Research Paper

785 Words2 Pages

The Medical Gopher is a computer-based physician order entry system. The foundation of Gopher took place at Regenstrief. It is designed by clinicians to make life of other clinicians easy. Gopher is basically a platform which facilitates clinical data entry and management, clinical decision support, electronic data capture for research and visualization of clinical data. Gopher works towards supporting patient safety, improve quality of care and user satisfaction and promote provider efficiency.
In 1991, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) examined the issues of medical record system and it was inferred that computer based patient entry is an integral part of EHR. The basics of CPOE systems as seen in Gopher includes dealing with data capture such …show more content…

One of the interesting features developed include ‘contextual alerting’. This will reduce alert fatigue. Most of the complaints are related to alerts that are clinically insignificant. In the latest Gopher system, alerts are triggered based on context (patient, provider and institution). Based on the relevance level which depends on context, the alerts are classified as interruptive, uninterruptive or suppressed. The alert is created and stored in a component called as relevance adjustment module (RAM). This is used for drug-drug interaction alerts. RAM facilitates displaying alerts for trainees and medical students interruptively whereas reduced frequency for the experienced ones. Thus clinical knowledge level along with the clinical knowledge is taken into consideration. However, if an alert is suppressed over again and again, the system asks for justification. If proper justification is provided then the alert will be suppressed for the patient for future. This is described as use of learning …show more content…

The inpatient setting was targeted by Gopher in 1990. At present, it supports 350 bed hospital, 12 community health centers, 79 clinics providing primary care, subspecialty, mental health, women and children’s health, and senior services. (1) Gopher has worked towards clubbing Clinician Physician Order Entry (CPOE) with Clinical decision support (CDS). It has an effective and efficient order entry system however, the interface had remain unchanged for nearly 25 years. In the year 2009, Regenstrief started rebuilding Gopher and in 2010, work on a new web-based version of Gopher was initiated. The new Gopher like the previous one supports clinical care and research. It also supports innovation related to research and clinical care. The knowledge that was accumulated over 25 years and several literatures on CPOE system helped in renovating Gopher. The original Gopher was DOS based. However, the current version was written in Java and JavaScript. The new Gopher was made with an intention to give the feel of consumer web applications. For example, order carts were used to add orders like labs, medication etc. This helped them to reduce training requirements and make it user friendly. In 2012, Gopher was certified for both ambulatory and inpatient settings. The new Gopher is now in use by over 1100 users a day, including an average of 433 physicians caring for over 3600 patients daily.

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