Decision Support

The statistics are disturbing: between 10 percent and 15 percent of medical diagnoses are incorrect and those diagnostic errors have a high cost -- even death. To combat potential patient harm and reduce the costs from misdiagnosis, hospitals and medical practices are turning to clinical decision support tools.

The deployment of clinical and business intelligence tools is evolving, according to researchers at HIMSS Analytics, who increasingly see organizations "doing their data analytics are seeing their practice patterns," seeing what works and what doesn't, and then delivering that information to the bedside.

New research from the National Quality Forum (NQF) supports the use of effective IT tools and promotes clinical decision support. The two reports, Driving Quality: A Model to Measure Electronic Health IT Use and Driving Quality and Performance Measurement: A Foundation for Clinical Decision Support, also delve into ways to measure health IT use.

CHRISTUS Health, a Dallas-base healthcare system, has implemented five new clinical decision support systems in order to improve care.