HIV/HBV/HCV Triple Screening in Primary Care

This will be a within-subjects repeated-measures design, testing an electronic medical record pop-up alert linked to order panels for screening blood tests for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), and hepatitis C virus (HCV). Study participants will be primary care providers. For each participating provider, their encounter will be randomized to either control (no alert; no changes to EMR interface) or an alert with triple-testing order panel intervention arm (alert linked to order panel with screening tests for all three bloodborne viruses (BBVs) selected by default; the alert will be triggered when a provider attempts to order a screening test for at least one BBV). The alert linked to triple testing orders will only be triggered if the provider orders a virus BBV screening test based on their normal practice and standard of care for their patient. Providers will see which orders are selected prior to signing (finalizing) them; therefore, this study will be unblinded. To mitigate the effect of unblinding, randomization will occur at the encounter level which will lead to providers experiencing both the control and intervention conditions randomly throughout the duration of the study.

Outcomes/endpoints:

The investigators will compare incidences of HIV, HBV, and HCV diagnoses between the two encounter conditions, estimate number of cases missed by not triple-testing, estimate laboratory costs per condition, and measure patient encounters per condition.