The Health division of Wolters Kluwer, a leading global provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry, announced today that two presentations during the HIMSS16 Conference & Exhibition will explore the impact of its Clinical Drug Information drug data solution Medi-Span® on medication errors and alert fatigue. The presentations will showcase how Group Health Cooperative South Central Wisconsin (GHC-SCW) and MetroHealth Systems used the drug data and medication decision support solution to reduce nuisance alerts and physician overrides as well as optimize drug-dose decision support to prevent clinically significant prescribing errors.
GHC-SCW Formulary Pharmacist Michael Ochowski, R.Ph., and IT Team Lead-Interoperability Philip Boll will provide an in-depth look at the 2015 initiative undertaken by the non-profit health plan, consisting of 82,000 members and five primary care clinics, to reduce nuisance alerts and improve the organization’s override rate, which stood at more than 95%. By filtering alerts based on clinical staff input and clinical metrics built in part from Medi-Span severity classifications, supporting evidence and significance scores, GHC-SCW reduced the overall number of alerts per 100 orders by nearly half and achieved a decline in override rates. Distribution of alerts also improved, with pharmacy managing two-thirds of the load, significantly reducing the burden on physicians.
“Alert fatigue: improving alert impact by reducing noise” takes place on March 2 at 4 p.m. PST, in Palazzo G in the Sands Expo Convention Center in Las Vegas.
MetroHealth System CMIO and Vice President of Health Informatics David Kaelber, MD, PhD, MPH, who is board-certified in clinical informatics, will walk attendees through the Cleveland, Ohio-based health system’s approach to optimizing drug-dose clinical decision support (CDS) to prevent clinically significant errors from occurring within the estimated 3.4 million prescriptions its physicians order annually. Leveraging Medi-Span to help optimize sensitivity and specificity drove an 80% reduction in alerts without impacting those that are clinically significant. Alerts now fire on just 3% of orders at MetroHealth, which received the HIMSS Analytics EMRAM Stage 7 Ambulatory award in 2014 and is a 2015 HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award recipient.
“Optimizing drug-dose checking to minimize alert fatigue” takes place on March 4 at Noon PST in Lando 4205 in the convention center.
“Implementation of evidence-based medication decision support impacts patient safety by improving adherence to generally accepted standards based on patient-specific information. However, these outcomes cannot be fully achieved if attention is not paid to alert fatigue,” said Denise Basow, MD, President & CEO of Clinical Effectiveness at Wolters Kluwer. “The Medi-Span solution streamlines valuable content and decision support functionality into customizable, intelligent databases and integrated tools that help reduce alert fatigue by maximizing sensitivity and specificity to produce more clinically-significant alerts.”
Wolters Kluwer will feature its full suite of Clinical Drug Information solutions in Booth #5537 at HIMSS16, which takes place February 29 through March 4 at the Sands Expo Convention Center in Las Vegas.