FDB talks about well-timed, patient-specific clinical decision support at HIMSS24
FDB (formerly First Databank) is known for providing drug knowledge and clinical decision support, helping healthcare professionals make accurate decisions.
In booth 1747 at HIMSS24, the company will talk to attendees about the need for patient-specific clinical decision support, timing alerts to support medication decisions and additional guidance for healthcare providers only when relevant to a patient’s immediate care needs, proactive maintenance of CDS, and physician burnout.
We interviewed Anna Dover, PharmD, director of product management at FDB, to explore these issues.
Q. At HIMSS24 you talked about “patient-specific” clinical decision support. Why the emphasis on patient-specific? Please provide some more information.
A. Doctors, nurses and pharmacists are inundated with alerts all day long to support clinical decisions. Although the alerts are intended to protect the safety and health of patients, many of them may be non-specific and provide guidance that is not relevant to that specific clinical scenario or patient.
For example, a doctor may prescribe a drug that can increase potassium levels in the blood – a condition called hyperkalemia – and yet that same patient is also taking a drug that depletes potassium. A note of caution about the concern for hyperkalemia is not necessarily relevant to this patient. To truly determine if there is a safety issue, the patient’s labs must be taken into account.
Bringing this additional context, this patient specificity, into the alert reduces the noise and makes the alerts more meaningful and impactful. Alertness fatigue is well documented as it can cause physicians to overlook or ignore alerts that require their attention and action.
Making CDS specific to the patient and the situation at hand can reduce alarm fatigue, but more importantly, better protect the patient’s health and safety. Medication alerts can help prevent errors and optimize drug therapy decisions when they are meaningful and relevant to the physician and patient in question.
Q. You have bThe timing of alerts to support medication decisions and additional guidance for healthcare providers is discussed only when relevant to a patient’s immediate care needs. This seems clearly aimed at combating burnout among doctors. How is this effort going?
A. There is certainly greater awareness of burnout today than before the pandemic. Physician burnout has received a lot of attention in recent years as physicians, nurses, and virtually everyone involved in healthcare became overwhelmed and exhausted caring for so many with limited staff and resources.
Healthcare systems today continue to face severe staffing shortages in virtually all clinical functions due to high rates of layoffs and turnover. As a result, many more organizations are prioritizing improvements to reduce and prevent burnout.
Leading healthcare systems have looked for ways to streamline workflows, automate steps, and deliver the right information to the right place in the workflow so that the physician doesn’t have to dig through records or sift through clinical guidelines to make a fully informed decision to take.
The healthcare systems we work with have made great strides in improving the relevance of medication alerts while reducing overall volume. By using the right CDS technology, they can make rapid progress without impacting other high-priority projects or increasing their maintenance burden.
Q. What have caregivers told you is the biggest decision support challenge they face, besides alert fatigue leading to burnout? And how do you propose to overcome it?
A. The biggest challenge is proactively maintaining CDS. Healthcare is constantly changing, with medical evidence and guidelines constantly evolving. It can be challenging to keep up with the pace of change when there are so many other priorities for the healthcare system’s EHR teams. Lack of proper maintenance can lead to CDS failures, which can lead to missing warnings or even inaccurate warnings.
Finding ways to reduce the maintenance burden is crucial. Many healthcare systems we work with have adopted our patient-specific medication content because we provide maintenance for them.
We have experts who continually review the latest research from thousands of journals and guidance from medical associations and integrate them into our solutions. We communicate updates so they can determine how this may impact them.
Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.