Supportive Submission 3 – Clinical Decision Support Tools
Clinical decision support (CDS) provides timely information, usually at the point of care, to help inform decisions about a patient’s care. CDS tools and systems help clinical teams by taking over some routine tasks, warning of potential problems, or providing suggestions for the clinical team and patient to consider. CDS tools should be designed to organize, filter, and present useful information at the appropriate point in time to the person who can use it to make a decision. One example of CDS tool is an alert a pharmacist sees in his/her ordering system when attempting to order a medication for a patient that has a potentially fatal interaction with another drug the patient is taking. When implemented properly and used correctly, these tools should produce measureable improvement in the clinical decisions made by clinicians, care teams, and patients.
What are some clinical decision support tools that benefit (if in existence) or would benefit clinicians care teams, and patients utilizing your chosen system? Think about how the workflow can be improved for practitioners and health care safer for patients.