Extracting the full value of clinical decision support to enhance patient care
Medication errors continue to be a major issue in healthcare, causing preventable patient harm and placing a significant economic burden on the system. Despite national initiatives like the 2014 National Action Plan for Adverse Drug Event Prevention, adverse drug events (ADEs) remain one of the top causes of medical errors, resulting in thousands of hospital deaths and billions in costs annually. Clinical decision support (CDS) tools, particularly those integrated within electronic health records (EHRs), have emerged as a critical strategy for reducing medication errors by offering real-time alerts about drug interactions, dosing issues, and allergies. However, the effectiveness of CDS has been undermined by "alert fatigue," where clinicians, overwhelmed by excessive or irrelevant alerts, often override important warnings, potentially leading to avoidable errors.
To enhance the impact of CDS, healthcare organizations are shifting toward more targeted and context-aware alerting systems. Successful examples, like those at Group Health Cooperative and MetroHealth, demonstrate that filtering and prioritizing alerts based on clinical significance and patient-specific data can dramatically reduce unnecessary alerts and override rates. Key strategies include integrating advanced drug data solutions, leveraging patient-specific variables (age, weight, diagnosis), and enabling EHR customization to better match clinical workflows. By fostering collaboration between IT and clinical teams and focusing on continuous alert optimization, healthcare providers can better harness CDS tools to improve medication safety, reduce costs, and ultimately deliver more effective and personalized patient care.
When optimally deployed, CDS has the potential to significantly help enhance patient care and reduce medication errors. By implementing systems that support a holistic approach to combating alert fatigue, healthcare stakeholders can more fully realize the value of their CDS and EHR investments and notably raise the bar on patient care and safety. Learn more today by filling out the form above to download the whitepaper.
