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Clinical Decision Support (CDS) tools are designed to help, not hinder. However, often these tools have been noted as one of the reasons for clinician burnout and other issues, mainly due to alert fatigue.
A recent study published in the Yearbook of Medical Informatics provided five suggestions to improving CDS usage and therefore increasing patient safety and medication accuracy.
CDS tools should:
Decrease clinician burden if they can improve alert relevance and lower the number of alerts (i.e., no alert is better than the wrong or poorly designed alert)
Garner and solicit end-user feedback to understand user-experience, enhance trust and enhance alert relevance
Be customized for the physician or other healthcare staffer using the tool
Leverage and measure outcomes and metrics
Continuously optimize to improve and fine-tune the tool
The major takeaway? There’s much opportunity for improvement, and in order to get clinician buy-in, the tools should reflect these improvements to stay ahead of technology trends and medical standards. Optimizing the tools will not only increase physician satisfaction but also improve patient safety.
AvoMD’s apps transform old, dated guidelines and workflows into highly-accessible, user-friendly information at the point-of-care. Not only are the guidelines customized to the clinician, but insights powered by analytics allow the team at AvoMD to optimize and improve the tool.