Decision support in medicine: lessons from the HELP system

PURPOSE: This report describes an ongoing transition from the HELP Hospital Information System to HELP II, a replacement Health Information System built to manage clinical information captured in a variety of medical settings. The focus of the article is on the medical decision support provided by this system and studied by researchers at the University of Utah and Intermountain Health Care (IHC), a large health care organization in Utah, for many years. METHODS: Select success features of the original HELP system's decision support environment are identified and lessons learned are related. Plans for transferring these features to HELP II are discussed. RESULTS: The article focuses on four features: (1) the importance of easy access to patient data essential for decision support, (2) the commitment to continued measurement and revision of both the logic and the interventional strategy in a decision support application, (3) experience with data mining as a tool for developing decision support tools, and (4) the role of clinical reports in supporting the decision making process.