The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Protocol-Based Computer Reminders, the Quality of Care and the Non-Perfectability of Man
Abstract
To determine whether clinical errors can be reduced by prospective computer suggestions about the management of simple clinical events, I studied the responses of nine physicians to computer suggestions generated by 390 protocols in a controlled crossover design. These protocols dealt primarily with conditions managed (e.g., elevated blood pressure) or caused (e.g., liver toxicity) by drugs. Physicians responded to 51 per cent of 327 events when given, and 22 per cent of 385 events when not given computer suggestions. Neither level of postgraduate training (first-year postgraduate or third-year post-graduate) nor the order in which physicians served as study and control subjects had statistically significant overall effect on the results. It appears that the prospective reminders do reduce errors, and that many of these errors are probably due to man's limitations as a data processor rather than to correctable human deficiencies.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Chaudhry, B., Wang, J., Wu, S., Maglione, M., Mojica, W., Roth, E., Morton, S. C., & Shekelle, P. G. (2006) · Annals of Internal Medicine · doi:10.7326/0003-4819-144-10-200605160-00125 · Cited by 3,159
Garg, A. X., Adhikari, N. K. J., McDonald, H., Rosas-Arellano, M. P., Devereaux, P. J., Beyene, J., Sam, J., & Haynes, R. B. (2005) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.293.10.1223 · Cited by 2,936
Knowledge translation of research findings
Grimshaw, J. M., Eccles, M. P., Lavis, J. N., Hill, S. J., & Squires, J. E. (2012) · Implementation Science · doi:10.1186/1748-5908-7-50 · Cited by 2,407
Bates, D. W., Kuperman, G. J., Wang, S., Gandhi, T., Kittler, A., Volk, L., Spurr, C., Khorasani, R., Tanasijevic, M., & Middleton, B. (2003) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1197/jamia.m1370 · Cited by 1,346
Avorn, J., & Soumerai, S. B. (1983) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejm198306163082406 · Cited by 854
Metadata
- Authors
- McDonald, C. J.
- Venue
- New England Journal of Medicine
- Publisher
- Massachusetts Medical Society
- Published
- 1976-12-09
- Volume
- 295
- Issue
- 24
- Pages
- 1351-1355
- ISSN
- 0028-4793 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-4406
- OpenAlex
- W1971040337
- Cited by
- 798
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 47.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Protocol-Based Computer Reminders, the Quality of Care and the Non-Perfectability of Man. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1056/nejm197612092952405
- The paper
- McDonald, C. J. (1976). Protocol-Based Computer Reminders, the Quality of Care and the Non-Perfectability of Man. New England Journal of Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm197612092952405
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
