Using Clinical Decision Support to Meet Your HIE Objectives

"Meaningful use" continues to be a strong buzz phrase in the world of health information technology. After all, if you want to receive incentives from the government, then you'll have to demonstrate "meaningful use." There's an upcoming webinar titled, "Using Clinical Decision Support to Meet Your HIE Objectives."

This webinar is sponsored by PEPID and it will cover "how you can meet your HIE objectives and achieve meaningful use through clinical decision support." 

• How to achieve TRUE “meaningful use”
• What content and features are important to healthcare professionals
• Developing a HIT system that maximizes usability
• How to integrate clinical decision support into any EMR, EHR, EDIS, CPOE or HIT system
• How the right API can drive down costs, maximize workflow and improve efficiency
• Overcoming nomenclature obstacles and lowering switching costs
• Enhancing web portals with clinical decision support and drug data

Hear from the experts who have extensive experience in both wireless and system integration and have been implemented in hundreds of systems, hospitals and clinics worldwide.

You can register for this complimentary event here.

Computerized Alerts Can Influence Drug Prescribing

Thanks to Epocrates for pointing me to these 2 interesting abstracts on computer-based decision support:

• The first one (published in the J Am Geriatr Soc.) is titled, "Computerized decision support to reduce potentially inappropriate prescribing to older emergency department patients: a randomized, controlled trial." The authors found that "Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) with decision support significantly reduced prescribing of potentially inappropriate medications for seniors."
  
• The second one (published in the J Gen Intern Med.) is, "Reducing the prescribing of heavily marketed medications: a randomized controlled trial." The authors found that "Computerized decision support is an effective tool to reduce the prescribing of heavily marketed hypnotic medications in ambulatory care settings."

In the future, we will be bombarded with automated drug safety alerts since almost every drug will have major safety warnings and potential drug-drug interactions. These alerts will be especially important when we're treating older adults who are often taking multiple medications. Do you use CPOE? If you don't right now, you can plan on using it within the next few years. Hospitals will become so digital that we'll see more computers than paper everywhere.

Here are the links for the abstracts:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19549022
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19475459

Zynx Health and eClinicalWorks join forces: Zynx AmbulatoryCare

Headline: "Zynx Health and eClinicalWorks Enter Agreement to Offer Clinical Decision Support to EHR Software Users." They've joined forces and they've created: Zynx AmbulatoryCare order sets for eClinicalWorks clients. According to a recent press release, "the evidence-based content will provide an out-of-the-box solution to help eClinicalWorks clients improve quality of care and succeed in performance measure programs." Let's hope that we see improvements in patient outcomes as more healthcare providers make evidence-based clinical decisions.

“The new features in eClinicalWorks Version 8 made order sets a key part of clinical workflow,” said Scott Weingarten, MD, MPH, president and CEO of Zynx. “The fully integrated library of order sets from Zynx will help eClinicalWorks clients take advantage of this new EHR functionality. Evidence-based clinical decision support, such as order sets, is becoming increasingly important as physician practices work to demonstrate ‘meaningful use’ of EHRs.”

“eClinicalWorks offers its customers the latest technologies to help improve patient care, through both its solutions and its partners,” said Girish Kumar Navani, CEO and co-founder of eClinicalWorks. “Using Zynx with our EMR/PM system will offer providers additional resources in line with the latest performance measures.”

Zynx Health was founded in 1996 by thought leaders in evidence-based healthcare and healthcare quality improvement. Acquired by the Hearst Corporation in 2004, Zynx has grown to become a recognized leader in evidence-based clinical decision support, and offers a suite of online solutions that help clinicians treat patients based on the best available evidence from systematic research. The Zynx team of physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals rigorously reviews the latest peer-reviewed literature to develop clinically relevant summaries and distill evidence-based best practices.

eClinicalWorks® is a privately held leader in the ambulatory clinical systems market. The company’s unified electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management (PM) solutions are proven for every market segment: large practice groups, including Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC), Electronic Health Records of Rhode Island (EHRRI), and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, as well as medium, small, and solo practices regardless of specialty.

Zynx Health

If you haven't read about Zynx Health, you should get familiar with this company that provides decision support and applies evidence-based clinical recommendations.

Technology + medicine = improved patient outcomes.

It's great to see innovation at work.