Primary care providers
••“Sometimes the BPA* fires even when the patient obviously doesn’t qualify.”
••“The BPA comes up for anyone who has a fever and a sore throat. Some people do not have muscle aches or other concerns for the flu and have a low pretest probability of a positive test. It would be a waste of resources to swab the unlikely people . . . .”
••“The threshold for firing the influenza BPA is very low.”
••“We need to get the results back in a more timely fashion in order for them to be clinically useful, especially for treatment decisions.”
••“BPAs are repetitive.”
••“Tweak the indications so that the BPA fires appropriately. Make sure that doing the test causes the BPA to go away!”
••“[A]uthorizing nursing [staff] to swab anyone with given criteria could facilitate larger enrollment if there is no limitation on the number of tests.”
Nursing staff
••“Patient symptoms are not indicative to ordering test such as no fever or sore throat.”
••“Fever seems to prompt the BPA for flu testing. Patients will present with fever due to other reasons — sometimes with urinary problems — and an influenza swab is not needed. We can use our judgment, as nurses, to consult and communicate with doctors when BPAs are not needed. If it is a strict rule, then there will be some problems.”
••“More help — staff.”
BPA = best-practice alert (clinical decision support alert).
* Comments listed are representative of opinions offered by at least two respondents.
Table 3: Comments* from primary care providers and nursing staff regarding the role of computer decision support alerts in the pilot respiratory virus surveillance system.