Cinical Decision Support Streamlined by Community Health Network

Clinical decision assistance is a challenging topic. It’s a problem that Community Health Network has been dealing with for a long time. Hundreds of physicians and other clinicians provide care at the health system’s more than 200 locations throughout Indianapolis and Central Indiana, including nine specialty and acute care hospitals. These physicians and clinicians, like all healthcare practitioners, are exceedingly busy, and there is evidence that reacting to an excessive number of CDS alerts generated by electronic health records has contributed to their burnout in recent years.

As a result, the influence on the end user is one of the challenges that healthcare companies must consider when designing or implementing CDS, according to Dr. Patrick McGill, executive vice president and chief analytics officer of Community Health Network. In short, the key difficulty we’re continually attempting to solve is ensuring that the appropriate alert is presented at the right time, in the right location in the workflow, to the right person, in the right situation.

It’s also crucial to understand the function of the end user, whether that’s a doctor, nurse, pharmacist, or other clinician. When the health system first looked into CDS a few years ago, it estimated that all of its clinicians received more than 30 million warnings per year. It switched off six warnings that were found to be an annoyance to most Clinical staff after conducting its own analysis.

Turning off those six notifications alone resulted in a reduction of more than 12 million alerts each year. McGill remarked that the remaining 18 million people are still much too many, which is why the health system is continuing to research the issue and increasing its connection with CDS provider FDB by integrating the vendor’s CDS Analytics module.