Comprehensive Drug Database Use

One of the concepts we have been trying to shed some more light on is the importance of having drug data and clinical decision support data that can be easily customized to the needs of the end user location.  In last year's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Annual Meeting there were Guidelines Into Decision support that were presented.  These are also know as the acronym GLIDES.  These guidelines are actually a pretty interesting take on the advancement of Clinical Decision Support.

In order to account for users in various types of settings and locations, as well as different dosage precautions, this report specifically calls out the need for better customization.  This may seem a lofty goal but is, nonetheless, worthwhile.  The need to customize clinical decision support to the end user makes complete sense in the fact that being able to deliver appropriate alerts through an EMR geared toward a certain specialty is critical. For example, pediatric dosage calculations and alerts would really be most appropriate within a pediatric practice and, for this reason, these end users may want to see something different.  In an EMR for an oncology practice it would make sense that an alert specific to a chemo regimen appear.  Just something else to think about when building your drug data.