A Roadmap for National Action on Clinical Decision Support

American Medical Informatics Association

Clinical decision support (CDS) provides clinicians, staff, patients or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information, intelligently filtered or presented at appropriate times, to enhance health and health care. It encompasses a variety of tools and interventions such as computerized alerts and reminders, clinical guidelines, order sets, patient data reports and dashboards, documentation templates, diagnostic support, and clinical workflow tools.

Clinical outcomes resulting from telemedicine interventions: a systematic review

BioMed Central

The use of telemedicine is growing, but its efficacy for achieving comparable or improved clinical outcomes has not been established in many medical specialties. The objective of this systematic review was to evaluate the efficacy of telemedicine interventions for health outcomes in two classes of application: home-based and office/hospital-based.

Feasibility study of multidisciplinary oncology rounds by videoconference for surgeons in remote locales

BioMed Central

This study was undertaken to assess the feasibility of using videoconferencing to involve community-based surgeons in interactive, multidisciplinary oncology rounds so they may benefit from the type of community of practice that is usually only available in academic cancer centres.

Case-based medical informatics

BioMed Central

The "applied" nature distinguishes applied sciences from theoretical sciences. To emphasize this distinction, we begin with a general, meta-level overview of the scientific endeavor. We introduce the knowledge spectrum and four interconnected modalities of knowledge. In addition to the traditional differentiation between implicit and explicit knowledge we outline the concepts of general and individual knowledge.

Quantitative evaluation of recall and precision of CAT Crawler, a search engine specialized on retrieval of Critically Appraised Topics

BioMed Central

Critically Appraised Topics (CATs) are a useful tool that helps physicians to make clinical decisions as the healthcare moves towards the practice of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). The fast growing World Wide Web has provided a place for physicians to share their appraised topics online, but an increasing amount of time is needed to find a particular topic within such a rich repository.

Computer-aided DSM-IV-diagnostics – acceptance, use and perceived usefulness in relation to users' learning styles

BioMed Central

CDSS (computerized decision support system) for medical diagnostics have been studied for long. This study was undertaken to investigate how different preferences of Learning Styles (LS) of psychiatrists might affect acceptance, use and perceived usefulness of a CDSS for diagnostics in psychiatry.

Optimal search strategies for identifying sound clinical prediction studies in EMBASE

BioMed Central

Clinical prediction guides assist clinicians by pointing to specific elements of the patient's clinical presentation that should be considered when forming a diagnosis, prognosis or judgment regarding treatment outcome. The numbers of validated clinical prediction guides are growing in the medical literature, but their retrieval from large biomedical databases remains problematic and this presents a barrier to their uptake in medical practice. We undertook the systematic development of search strategies ("hedges") for retrieval of empirically tested clinical prediction guides from EMBASE.

The tissue micro-array data exchange specification: a web based experience browsing imported data

BioMed Central

The AIDS and Cancer Specimen Resource (ACSR) is an HIV/AIDS tissue bank consortium sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis (DCTD). The ACSR offers to approved researchers HIV infected biologic samples and uninfected control tissues including tissue cores in micro-arrays (TMA) accompanied by deidentified clinical data. Researchers interested in the type and quality of TMA tissue cores and the associated clinical data need an efficient method for viewing available TMA materials.

An Approach for Improving Business And Clinical Performance

Healthcare Technology

Rising consumerism coupled with falling profit margins has produced a challenging dilemma for healthcare organizations: providing the highest quality care for the lowest possible cost. Today care is a product, payers and patients are customers, healthcare is a business and quality care is more than an ethical concern – it is an economic imperative.

Clinical Decision Support in Electronic Prescribing: Recommendations and an Action Plan

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services

HHS plays a major role in financing and regulating healthcare in the US, and also in improving its quality. Ensuring that clinicians and consumers/patients utilize high quality, timely, relevant medical information to guide their healthcare decisions is essential for improved quality of care, patient safety, and appropriate utilization of resources. HHS therefore has a strong interest in the availability and intelligent delivery of this medical information through CDS.

National Patient Safety Goals: Impact on Thomson Micromedex Content and Products

Thomson Micromedex

Thomson Micromedex is present in virtually every stage of delivering medical care. From medication order processing to the delivery of patient education, Micromedex delivers critical clinical knowledge solutions for both clinicians and their patients. Healthcare professionals rely on Micromedex to provide consistent and accurate content to support their patient safety initiatives, including efforts to comply with Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG), and Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP)

A New Paradigm for Information Retrieval: InfoButton Access Delivers Knowledge for Point-of-Care Applications

Thomson Micromedex

In the course of treating patients, a broad range of medical questions face clinicians. According to research, most of these clinical questions go unanswered, usually due to insufficient references being available, or time constraints in conducting the necessary research1,2,3,4. When questions go unanswered, the possibilities of practice variation, medical errors, preventable adverse events, and even patient death all exist.

High Alert: IV Medication Safety and the Challenge of IV Compatibility

Thomson Micromedex

In an environment where patient safety issues have moved front and center, healthcare providers are striving to implement processes and tools that produce measurable improvements. Against this backdrop, most hospitals are taking steps to reduce medication errors – a major component of the patient safety issue. With its inherently high-alert medications, high-risk administration routes, and high vulnerability patients, IV medication therapies present an opportunity to create meaningful and lasting improvements in patient safety.

Increasing the Safety and Cost-effectiveness of Medication Use Through Clinical Decision Support

Thomson Micromedex

This paper examines how the increasing costs of medication error—in terms of life, quality of care, and dollars—have made medication management one of the most critical issues for healthcare administrators. It explains the key requisite for effective medication management—putting the right information in the hands of the right people at the right time—and the role drug knowledge resources play in facilitating these circumstances.

From Information to Action: Empowering Patients with Education to Improve Outcomes

Thomson Micromedex

This paper describes the factors—improved clinical outcomes, reduced healthcare costs, and enhanced patient satisfaction—underlying the importance of patient education programs. It examines the role of informational databases as tools to help provide effective and efficient educational content to patients. Next, it delineates the characteristics of quality patient education content and describes an effective solution that can provide it. Finally, this paper projects the future of patient education and what is required to realize it.

Harnessing the Power of Clinical Decision Support to Improve Healthcare Outcomes

Touch Briefings

As many as 98,000 people will die each year in US hospitals as the result of preventable medical errors. Of those admitted to hospitals, 10% or more will be harmed, and as many as half with certain common conditions will receive sub-optimal treatment, because care is not based on appropriate information. This quality crisis results in incalculable human suffering, millions of extra hospital days and billions of dollars of unnecessary costs.