Identifying an important drug interaction

On July 14 the final Meaningful Use rules were released and gave some specific requirements for clinical decision alerting.  This ruling means that clinical decision support and the drug nomenclature that is incorporated into these systems will be evaluated with a more critical eye than ever.  With these new meaningful use requirements, clinicians that write more than 100 e-prescriptions during the reporting period must have drug-drug interaction, drug-allergy, duplicate therapy and formulary screening alerts enabled within their systems and have a way to track user response to these alerts.

With this paradigm shift in the way healthcare is being delivered, it will be paramount that these systems provide accurate, meaningful clinical decision support and avoid the pitfalls of alert fatigue.  Now is the time clinicians should demand that the clinical systems that are implemented have quality alerting and drug reference information based on current clinical guidelines.