Clinical Decision Support Concepts
Clinical decision support provides clinicians, staff, patients or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information, intelligently filtered or presented at appropriate times, to enhance health and health care.
It encompasses a variety of tools and interventions such as computerized alerts and reminders, clinical guidelines, order sets, patient data reports and dashboards, documentation templates, diagnostic support, and clinical workflow tools. The core features we look to employ include:
Deploying decision support tools with guidelines:
Severity grading system and alerts, integrated decision support scales, medication database through integration with existing prescription ordering systems, evidence based research and evaluation and collaborative study approach to confirm results of real clinicians who have used the technology.
Clinical user collaboration
Multi-user access, real time data updating, cross platform independent, standardisation of data access and storage for future health system integration.
Workflow automation
Provides automated documentation, provides easy to read and useful hospital and clinician specific reports, updated real-time patient summaries.
Interoperable technology platforms XML, standardised data structures, web services.
Detailed Clinical Reporting
Real time reporting capabilities, hospital statistical measures, clinical key performance indicators, audit and compliance reports.
Clinical Decision Support has been effective in improving outcomes at health care institutions and practice sites by making needed medical knowledge readily available to knowledge users.
Information extracted from “A Roadmap for National Action on Clinical Decision Support, June 13 2006”
Achieving desirable levels of patient safety, care quality, patient centeredness, and cost-effectiveness requires that the health system optimize its performance through consistent, systematic, and comprehensive application of available health-related knowledge – that is, through appropriate use of Clinical Decision Support which is an area of osTechnology research and expertise.