Identifying an important drug interaction

As the push for meaningful use continues, more and more clinicians of different backgrounds (physicians, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, etc.) will be using electronic systems to document patient care, write medication orders and make critical therapy decisions.  Using electronic systems can hopefully improve patient care and outcomes through highly relevant clinical decision support tools such as drug interaction screening, dosage range checking, allergy screening and other safety alerts.  The reality is that these tools must be able to not only provide meaningful and relevant alerts, but should also provide clinicians with the ability to further research the area of concern with trusted reference content.  Too many times a clinical warning message that is displayed in an HIS system does not provide enough context to the user to make better therapeutic decisions. 

As HIS system vendors navigate their way through the certification maze, it will be important to not settle for inferior clinical reference data to augment these systems.  Those millions of clinical alerts that fire everyday are only as good as the information behind them.