Healthcare organizations are recognizing that clinical decision support technology that integrates with electronic health records can be utilized to improve quality of care and better utilize staff and resources.
Community Medical Centers, for instance, had already embarked on adoption of an EHRs system when in 2014 it added clinical decision support technology to develop an evidence-based approach to care.
Such a system promised to help nurses and doctors save valuable time by integrating CDS tools into their care plan and, in turn, improving their communication with patients.
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“The goal was to enhance quality of care and efficiency,” said Lauren Garrick, Corporate Informatics Nurse and Plan of Care Coordinator at Community Medical Centers in Fresno, California.
The hospital group selected Zynx Health Plan of Care, which provided templates to allow nurses and doctors to recommend and provide relevant services by providing access to medical research libraries, comprising hundreds of diagnoses and procedures. With this generic information at their fingertips, the clinicians could focus on their individual patients. The CDS tools also easily integrated with Community Medical Centers’ digital Epic EHR system.
Garrick said a benefit for with Community Medical Centers was the ability of the Zynx system to be customized according to the needs of the hospital group. “They have software you build and an integration process you use to integrate it into your system,” Garrick said. “You can pull up these templates for plan of care and support changes and create templates in Excel files, and our tech team can migrate the files into EHRs.”
Garrick, along with Judi Binderman, VP and chief medical informatics officer for Community Medical Centers, will outline how CDS technology program was conceived, developed and implemented across the four hospitals in a presentation at HIMSS16.
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Their talk, “Taking Plans of Care from Clinician to Patient-Centric” will examine how Community Medical Centers replaced its homegrown, generic plans of care with the evidence-based, CDS system specific to the patient’s condition and adjustable to special requirements the patient may have.
Garrick said that with the CDS program in place, nurses can now easily access information on generic conditions for patients while examining and communicating with the patient closely.
“A nurse would have access to relevant information, and be able to instantly go through medical journals and web links for a patient,” she said. “For example, if they are advising someone about Sudden Infant Death prevention, a staff member can click on links and read research right at the patient’s bedside.”
“Taking Plans of Care from Clinician to Patient-Centric,” is scheduled for Wednesday March 2, 2016 from 10-11 AM in the Sands Expo Convention Center Palazzo G.
