The Covid-19 pandemic aside, there are several contributing factors:
- It is estimated that five to eight patient management decisions per clinician are impacted daily from the exponential growth of clinical research and the lack of reliable resources to help clinicians keep up.
- Roughly half of questions raised by clinicians in daily practiced are never pursued due to time pressures and access to reliable evidence.
- Medication errors are also a grave concern, costing the global healthcare industry $42 billion USD and resulting in avoidable adverse drug events and deaths.
These additional stresses weigh heavily on clinicians and care teams who are trying to align best practices and the latest medical information with their already demanding schedules and the administrative and financial challenges of their organizations.
How do clinicians navigate healthcare challenges?
There is practically no such thing as a simple patient visit anymore. This is because:
- A greater and constantly growing volume of medical research makes it hard for clinicians to keep up with the latest recommendations and standards of practice.
- More practitioners along each patient’s journey adds more complexity to care decisions.
- Many clinicians lack access to consistent, reliable, trusted information resources to help answer their questions at the point of care.
The right Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system can help clinicians navigate this clinical complexity and create consistent, standardized care practices.
However, when it comes to complex healthcare solutions, the wrong CDS tools can have the opposite effect, and instead of helping, lead to provider burnout.
Complex healthcare solutions need evidence-based answers
To avoid burnout, clinicians need to know they have access to informational resources that are reliable and based on clinical evidence and best practices. When clinicians can quickly and easily locate information on a range of clinical topics to answer their patient care and medication questions, it makes their jobs easier. And that helps to reduce the risk of provider burnout and improve clinician satisfaction.
Integrated, evidence-based CDS tools can eliminate variability across the patient journey, reduce diagnostic and treatment errors, and lower unnecessary costs.
How does CDS help address provider burnout?
Investing in the right CDS can provide aligned, consistent decision-making, standardizing the delivery of care, and improving patient outcomes.
But simply adding in another decision support tool isn’t enough. Too many tools can encumber a clinician’s workflow, introducing unnecessary tasks for clinicians, increasing the number of invasive clinical alerts, and compounding the causes of burnout.
How do you choose the right healthcare solutions?
The key is implementing strategic decision support tools that offer value to clinicians by creating efficiency, and enhancing patient safety and provider-patient interactions, rather than adding extraneous steps to their process. Look for solutions that:
- Contain the most relevant, up-to-date information
- Provide the right information, at the right time in the clinician workflow
- Simplify the clinician workflow by being easy to use
- Foster consistency of information across the continuum of care
To learn more about Clinical Decision Support (CDS) solutions for care teams, check out our “Information is the best medicine” eBook.
