The effect of a mobile clinical decision support system on the diagnosis of obesity and overweight in acute and primary care encounters.

The purpose of the study was to compare the proportion of obesity-related diagnoses in clinical encounters (N = 1874) documented by nurses using a personal digital assistant-based log with and without obesity decision support features. The experimental group encounters in the randomized controlled trial had significantly more (P = .000) obesity-related diagnoses (11.3%) than did the control group encounters (1%) and a significantly lower false negative rate (24.5% vs 66.5%, P = .000). The study findings provide evidence that integration of a decision support feature that automatically calculates an obesity-related diagnosis increases diagnoses and decreases missed diagnoses and suggest that such systems have the potential to improve the quality of obesity-related care.

RCT Entities:   Population Interventions Outcomes