Clinical Decision Support Tools Reduce Re-hospitalizations

Clinical decision support tools are useful in assisting clinicians in standardizing clinical best practices with staff and patients. Providers can link decision steps to existing EHR information through clinical decision support platforms to optimize available applications and workflows. Ultimately, researchers concluded the combination of pharmacogenetics testing and clinical decision support is indeed successful in reducing re-hospitalization and ED visits at 60 days following enrollment.

Reducing re-hospitalizations and ED visits is not only beneficial to patient care, but it also results in potential health resource utilization savings.

This perhaps goes without saying… and is a value of health information systems. However, good CDSS require good underlying terminology and the level of specificity encoded in the data (patient diagnoses, lab results, etc.) is usually not the level at which the decision support rules are written. You need a way to roll-up or subsume a group of patient-level data into a specific rule. For example, “All diabetic patients should have a HgbA1c test every 6 months”. “All diabetic patients” needs to be defined as a range of concepts. Same is true of “HgbA1c test” which might involve several different reportable labs…