Liora Guy-David, Ph.D., Vice President of Data, medCPU

As long as the healthcare industry lacks true interoperability among dissimilar systems, clinicians will have incomplete patient information at the point of care. This includes gaps over time, as when a clinician is unaware of imaging tests already completed, and gaps across care team members who record documentation in separate systems. Both types of gaps can compromise patient safety.

While we don’t typically think of gap-closing as being a primary clinical decision support (CDS) function, CDS systems do exactly that. Its success in informing decisions depends largely on the ability to analyze information from multiple systems, closing gaps in real-time. As a result, CDS is emerging as an essential tool for improving quality of care.

Decision-making support built with a more complete view of the patient

CDS systems run on top of EMRs, analyzing documentation as it is being entered and issuing alerts in EMR windows when conditions indicate the possibility of a medical error or compromised patient safety. This is often a matter of giving clinicians information of which they were unaware.

To fully inform alerts, advanced CDS systems supplement the structured data in EMRs and pull information retrieved from other systems such as those in labs and imaging departments. CDS leverages its comprehensive patient view by applying rules-based analysis regarding diagnoses and courses of care. By augmenting a physicians’ expertise with real-time information retrieval and gap-closing, CDS systems play a key role in promoting patient safety.

Historically, sepsis has been one of the most important medical conditions in the United States, yet it is not properly appreciated by many in terms of its real significance. Unlike heart disease and cancer, where most people at least generally know about the tremendous number of deaths and the financial impacts they create, sepsis is somewhat of a mystery to the general public.

According to the National Institute of General Medical Studies, sepsis strikes more than a million Americans every year and between 28 and 50 percent of these people die – far more than the number of U.S. deaths from prostate cancer, breast cancer and AIDS combined. While a great deal of improvement has been made in treating high-profile conditions in the last 10-15 years, sepsis is lagging behind in where it could and should be in terms of care. It costs billions of dollars to the healthcare industry, but by-and-large, care for sepsis in the United States is sub-par. 

To learn more about sepsis and its seemingly ambiguous presence within day-to-day healthcare environments, I spoke with Jim O’Brien, MD, MSc, Vice President of Quality and Patient Safety, Ohio Health Riverside Methodist Hospital, an 860-bed community teaching hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

The Health division of Wolters Kluwer, a leading global provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry, announced the release of a complimentary e-book that demonstrates the critical role of integrated clinical decision support (CDS) to driving value and optimizing patient care in today’s healthcare environments. Integrated Clinical Decision Support: Accelerating Adoption of Evidence-Based Care for Optimal Outcomes outlines the evolution of CDS technology and effective implementation of integrated solutions as a foundational strategy for improving overall clinical and financial performance.

As the timeline for value-based care accelerates on the national stage, the e-book provides timely information to equip healthcare providers with effective and sustainable CDS strategies that will increase uptake of evidence-based clinical practices. Specifically, today’s healthcare organizations must respond strategically to national initiatives such as the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program—placing approximately $1.4 billion in payments at risk—and plans to tie 90% of Medicare payments to quality or value measures by 2018.