Knowledge content of advance practice nurse and physician experts: A cognitive evaluation of clinical practice guideline comprehension

Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are intended to provide evidence based knowledge for decision making for patient care. However, these guidelines have been poorly adopted by healthcare providers. One reason for this may be the static paper-based formats, isolated from the point of care. Biomedical informatics has provided a solution to this limitation through Computer Interpretable Guidelines (CIGs). An essential component of this process is CPG translation to a computer interpretable model. From the guideline modeling literature, the translators of CPGs typically are physicians. It is not known if other healthcare providers (i.e., Advance Practice Nurses [APNs]) comprehend CPGs similarly. This descriptive study utilized novice and expert APN and physician participants (varied by level of expertise) in a CPG comprehension task. Demographic data, verbal protocols, and recall model drawings were obtained and analyzed by description, protocol analysis, discourse analysis, and content analysis. The findings of this study indicate similar comprehension by the expert APNs and physicians suggesting that either type of expert may be utilized for modeling CPGs.