Making Clinical Decision Support Valuable

Clinical decision support (CDS) is a broad term that can encompass a wide variety of tools or systems whose primary purpose to provide clinical guidance to health care professionals responsible for order entry and documentation in an electronic medical record (EMR).

Typically one thinks of the pop-up alerts within an EMR during order entry or documentation activities. Before CDS, clinicians performed the task of reviewing patient drug profiles in a "manual" method.  For example a clinician completing an allergy review had to compare each drug record against each allergy noted.  The clinician's personal knowledge of drugs and allergies were the tools of clinical decision support.

In today's world the EMR uses coded vocabularies to automate that clinical checking process. This automation improves the reliability and accuracy of the patient profile review; however, it also brings it's own "baggage" of potentially overwhelming the clinician with trivial information. Thoughtful implementation of the EMR settings, as well as the drug content data sets, can avoid provider dissatisfaction before it starts. Some drug content sets, such as Lexi-Data from Lexi-Comp, allow for some customization of  data to help reduce the noise factor and make the CDS alerts more meaningful.

Learn more about Lexi-Comp Integrated Data Solutions and how they can make your clinical decision support valuable to your clinicians.