January 5, 2007

Clinicians find PCOI website
a timesaver

Busy MGH clinicians seeking to squeeze some extra time into their packed schedules have been turning to a valuable resource: the Primary Care Office Insite (PCOI) intranet website. The site is a collaborative effort between the MGH General Medicine Unit and the Lab of Computer Sciences and offers practice guidelines, patient handouts, clinical resource links, useful forms and other resources. Among primary care practitioners at the MGH, 94 percent have used the PCOI website at least once during a two-month period. According to a 2006 survey, they reported that using the site saved them an average of 20 minutes per day.

Although the PCOI website is intended to serve MGH primary care physicians, users have registered from nearly every department at the hospital. The site also is popular at other Partners institutions, including BWH, Newton-Wellesley Hospital
and North Shore Medical Center. In total, the site has more than 9,000 registered users.

The PCOI site can be accessed by typing the letters "oi" into the URL address of any Partners computer or through the Start menu by clicking "Partners Applications," then "Clinical Resources" and then "PCOI — Primary Care Office Insite." For more
information, contact Jean Callahan, medical editor of the site, at jcallahan2@partners.org.