STRATEGIC PLAN FOR CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT
Introduction
In healthcare and medicine, nurses are faced with difficult decision-making situations and are required to strategically make those decisions, keeping in mind all patient aspects. Therefore, it creates the need for a well-designed clinical decision support system (CDS), a health information technology system designed to assist with clinical decision-making tasks to health professionals. This paper will be tackling CDS supports with interventions that meet essential requirements, areas identified as institutional priorities for clinical improvements, and how various approaches align with CDS rights and commandments as well as the desire to use standards-based scalable strategies. There will be a discussion on a systematic measure of the effect of the CDS intervention in the end.
Approach to ensure consideration of patient aspects
For a patient-centered healthcare systems approach, the creation of a four-division level dealing with the individual patient, the care team, the organization, and the political, economic environment. For the individual patient, the defining factors should be his needs and preferences, as seen in the recent healthcare policy changes emphasizing consumer-driven healthcare. The patient-centeredness starting point should be clinicians considering patients and their families as partners and incorporate their wishes and values into processes offering healthcare. (Palestro, 2020). However, different patients are involved differently in the care system. For them to give informed preferences and needs, they should access the same patient accessible forms as their care team. Generally, the purpose of a patient has shifted to being more active when delivering healthcare from just a passive care recipient.
The care team comprising the individual physician, the patient’s family, and a group of care providers standardizes care based on the most recent evidence, which helps them customize care and meet individual needs even for complex health problems. A member of the care team should ensure effective coordination and communication between the whole group and the patient. A health organization must do several things to support a patient-centered care delivery system, including investing in communication technologies, system engineering tools, and encouraging the creation of organizational cultures that support patient-centered care. The political and economic environment should strive to provide quality healthcare at an affordable price for patients.
Approach Alignment to CDS Rights and commandments
The above-discussed approach aligns with the CDS commandments in various ways, including being fast and straightforward—both the work teams and the organization work on establishing an effective communication system. The entry of data is only when needed to avoid double entry since all the participants contain a copy of recent documents with the patient’s information. The organization performs routine maintenance and evaluation of the system. Because the organization and work teams work together to share common goals, the CDS system fits the existing workflow and help employees understand their workflows better.
There is a developed concept of a framework that suggests what rights the CDS system should deliver, starting with the power of providing the right information at the right points of the workflow. The correct information encompasses providing the clinicians with information that is not readily observable. When data is where it is needed, there will be fewer alerts on mistakes. The CDS system should rightfully provide information through the right channels like the patient portal, in the correct intervention formats like flow sheets and patient lists and at the right points of the workflow like during decision making or action points. There’s a need for using standards-based scalable approaches because they are reusable across different representations of health. (Ashar et al., 2019) It also provides a common framework for conceptualizing health work.
Potential Areas to Focus on
National quality measures should guide clinical decision support. To reduce healthcare costs and improve quality, measuring and minimizing variation from clinical practices is conducted. CDS intervention types are there to address the format for delivering information to support decisions. They include examples of patient self-assessment form, clinician encounter documentation form, retrospective reporting, choice lists, and others. Readmissions rate remains above 50% within six months after discharge, as congestive heart failure remains the leading cause of hospitalization in the United States (Meleth et al., 2019). The readmissions are common to members between the ages of 18 – 44 years. There are areas identified as potential priorities for clinical improvement, and they include obesity, stroke early intervention and rehabilitation, and appropriate prenatal and intrapartum care.
One area that much needs quality improvement is that dealing with obesity, as seen among Americans. Obesity contributes to other diseases like heart failure, cancer, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. This area’s improvement can start by offering behavioral counseling, work patterns guidelines, exercise opportunities, and drug interventions. Measuring the effects of your CDS interventions is critical for future success. It can be done in four steps, first assessing CDS usability by capturing clinician feedback on CDS interventions. It will be followed by collecting and reporting intervention performance against clinical objectives and using measurement results to refine CDS intervention and involve end-users in CDS intervention enhancement.CDS has various benefits and should be incorporated to improve the quality of healthcare outcomes.
Reference
Palestro, C. J. (2020). GENERAL CLINICAL NUCLEAR MEDICINE COUNCIL.
Whitehead, N. S., Williams, L., Meleth, S., Kennedy, S., Ubaka-Blackmoore, N., Kanter, M., … & Nichols, J. (2019). The Effect of Laboratory Test-Based Clinical Decision Support Tools on Medication Errors and Adverse Drug Events: A Laboratory Medicine Best Practices Systematic Review. The journal of applied laboratory medicine, 3(6), 1035-1048.
Ashar, A. M., Lam, M. C., Zainudin, S., & Ismail, A. K. (2019). A Mobile-Based Clinical Decision Support Model Design for Remote Snakebite Management Consultation in Malaysia. Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience, 16(5-6), 2223-2232.