Electronic Preventive Services Selector Helps Clinicians Deliver Prevention at the Point of Care

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Electronic Preventive Services Selector (ePSS) is a quick hands-on tool designed to help primary care clinicians identify the screening, counseling, and preventive medication services that are appropriate for their patients. Based on recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the ePSS is available both as a PDA application and a Web-based tool and can be searched by specific patient characteristics, such as age, sex, and selected behavioral risk factors.

The ePSS for PDA has user-friendly components that make it easy to navigate and allows it to work on platforms for Palm® and Windows® operating systems.

The ePSS is designed to serve as an aid to clinical decisionmaking at the point of care. The 'real-time' search function allows a clinician to input a patient's age, gender, and selected behavioral risk factors, such as whether or not they smoke, in the appropriate fields. The software cross references the patient characteristics entered with the applicable Task Force recommendations and generates a report specifically tailored for that patient.

The Task Force, supported by AHRQ, is the leading independent panel of private-sector experts in prevention and primary care. Its recommendations are considered the gold standard for clinical preventive services. It conducts rigorous, impartial assessments of the scientific evidence for a broad range of preventive services.

The tool can be viewed and is available for download from the AHRQ Web site: http://www.ePSS.ahrq.gov.

Current as of January 2007

Internet Citation:

Electronic Preventive Services Selector Helps Clinicians Deliver Prevention at the Point of Care. January 2007. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. http://www.ahrq.gov/ppip/epssann.htm