AAFP, AAP Call for AMA to Support Tobacco Control Content in EHRs

The AAFP has long-standing policy on tobacco use, including a recommendation that urges family physicians to collaborate with other health professionals to counsel patients who smoke or use smokeless tobacco to quit. Now, that recommendation could become easier to follow, thanks to a measure introduced at the recent interim meeting of the AMA House of Delegates that calls for inclusion of prompts to ask about tobacco use in electronic health records, or EHRs.

The AAFP and the American Academy of Pediatrics co-sponsored a resolution that asks the AMA to advocate that all EHR systems include a template that prompts clinicians to collect data about patients' tobacco use, exposure to secondhand smoke, interest in quitting and past attempts to quit.

According to the resolution, automatic prompts in these systems also should remind clinicians to:

"In a busy family medicine practice, any way that a doctor can take a few minutes to talk to patients about their smoking gets the best results in getting them to stop," said AAFP Board Chair Jim King, M.D., of Selmer, Tenn., in an interview with AAFP News Now. King testified in support of the tobacco control EHR templates during a Nov. 9 reference committee hearing at the AMA interim meeting in Orlando, Fla.

According to that committee's report, testimony on the measure was mixed, with a number of speakers addressing "both the value and deterrents associated with multiple prompts that may be embedded in electronic medical record templates." In the end, delegates referred the resolution to the AMA Board of Trustees for its decision on what action to take.