Practitioner Preferences and Receptivity for Patient-Specific Advice from a Therapeutic Monitoring System*.

Abstract To examine the optimal design of advisories generated from an inpatient therapeutic monitoring system, we solicited practitioner ratings of four formats for three sample patient-specific advisories as well as their overall receptivity to such a monitoring system. Forty-one physicians and pharmacists including community practitioners (n=10), academic medical center internists (n=11), Veterans Administration general medicine attendings and senior medicine residents (n=9), and clinical pharmacists on the faculty of an academic medical center (n=11), participated in the study. Overall, two relatively “terse” advisories, communicating in phrases and sentence fragments, were rated more favorably than more elaborated advisories communicating the information in narrative form. The participants expressed a high receptivity to the use of a therapeutic monitoring system (4.93 on a six-point scale, with “6” representing the highest level of receptivity). The results will be used to direct the design of the advisories for one therapeutic monitoring system.