Why EHR Clinical Decision Support Devices Require More Research

Research indicates that effective, complex clinical decision support tools have lower EHR integration rates due to serious hurdles in research.

Real-time, patient-specific clinical decision support tools should be integrated into physician workflow, particularly given the near-ubiquitous adoption of EHRs. Despite this, physicians seen several hurdles to integrating CDS tools into their EHRs, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

In accordance to a research team led by Thomas McGinn, MD, MPH, CDS that is most successful in making better the patient care are those that provide real-time prompts to providers and that are hyper-specific to an individual patient’s medical history.

Although, the most commonly utilized CDS are one-dimensional, the team claims, and only provides physicians with general prompts.

“Most of the CDS tools being introduced are uni-dimensional and not incorporated into the physicians’ workflow,” McGinn and colleagues say. “[These are] one-dimensional alerts that are generally triggered by one or two EHR components like an element of patient history. Examples include flu-shot reminders at annual visits or reminders for colon-cancer screening triggered by patients’ age.”

While it is significant to remind sufferers to get their annual flu shot, these kinds of reminders have little effect on patient care because they rarely relate to the individual patient during the appointment and because the prompts are not presented to providers in an organic way.