Building and maintaining trust in clinical decision support: Recommendations from the Patient-Centered CDS Learning Network.

Knowledge artifacts in digital repositories for clinical decision support (CDS) can promote the use of CDS in clinical practice. However, stakeholders will benefit from knowing which they can trust before adopting artifacts from knowledge repositories. We discuss our investigation into trust for knowledge artifacts and repositories by the Patient-Centered CDS Learning Network's Trust Framework Working Group (TFWG). The TFWG identified 12 actors (eg, vendors, clinicians, and policy makers) within a CDS ecosystem who each may play a meaningful role in prioritizing, authoring, implementing, or evaluating CDS and developed 33 recommendations distributed across nine "trust attributes." The trust attributes and recommendations represent a range of considerations such as the "Competency" of knowledge artifact engineers and the "Organizational Capacity" of institutions that develop and implement CDS. The TFWG findings highlight an initial effort to make trust explicit and embedded within CDS knowledge artifacts and repositories and thus more broadly accepted and used.

The Imperative for Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support.

This commentary introduces the Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support (PCCDS) Learning Network, which is collaborating with AcademyHealth to publish "Better Decisions Together" as part of eGEMs. Patient-centered clinical decision support (CDS) is an important vehicle to address broad issues in the U.S. health care system regarding quality and safety while also achieving better outcomes and better patient and provider satisfaction. Defined as CDS that supports individual patients and their care givers and/or care teams in health-related decisions and actions, PCCDS is an important step forward in advancing endeavors to move patient-centered care forward. The PCCDS Learning Network has developed a framework, referred to as the Analytic Framework for Action (AFA), to organize thinking and activities around PCCDS. A wide array of activities the PCCDS Learning Network is engaging in to inform and connect stakeholders is discussed.

Enterprise-wide drug-drug interaction alerting system.

According to the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) 1999 report To Err is Human: Building a safer Health System, "medical errors kill some 44,000-98,0001 people in U.S. hospitals each year. Partners HealthCare System (PHS) is a large integrated delivery network in Boston, MA, which has as a goal improving patient care by preventing adverse drug events (ADE) and reducing medication errors enterprise-wide. PHS has developed a drug-drug Interaction (DDI) detection feature, for the suite of clinical applications currently used by its two major teaching institutions, Brigham & Women's Hospital (BWH) and Mass General Hospital (MGH). The following clinical applications will be using this drug-drug interaction feature: NICU Order Entry (OE) at BWH, MGH OE for pediatrics and adults, the Partners outpatient medical record, The LMR, and BICS OE at BWH.

End of visit: design considerations for an ambulatory order entry module.

Current paper-based processes for performing billing documentation and test ordering at the end of a clinic visit are fraught with problems, resulting in numerous workflow inefficiencies and significant revenue losses for a healthcare organization. Paper forms are often filled out inaccurately or incompletely, or can be misrouted or lost. Computerizing these processes can alleviate many of these problems. We are building a new module for our ambulatory electronic medical record system to automate these "end of visit" (EOV) activities, which includes completing encounter forms, ordering lab and diagnostic tests, and printing patient visit summaries. An EOV module must be carefully designed to incorporate the needs of clinicians, front office staff, ancillary labs, medical records, and finance departments. An optimally designed EOV system should be customizable to fit into the clinician's workflow, and should help reduce financial losses, improve clinical documentation, and reduce workflow inefficiencies.