Collaborative Overview

The CDS/PI Collaborative was formed in 2011 to help interdependent stakeholders effectively use CDS (as defined in the following box) to address business imperatives related to healthcare performance improvement.  Further details below, and in this slide deck.

CDS Definition from 'Improving Outcomes with CDS'

Clinical Decision Support is a process for enhancing health-related decisions and actions with pertinent, organized clinical knowledge and patient information to improve health and healthcare delivery. Information recipients can include patients, clinicians and others involved in patient care delivery; information delivered can include general clinical knowledge and guidance, intelligently processed patient data, or a mixture of both; and information delivery formats can be drawn from a rich palette of options that includes data and order entry facilitators, filtered data displays, reference information, alerts and others.


The Collaborative's work builds on best practices for improving outcomes with CDS from the best-selling, award-winning HIMSS CDS Guidebook series - especially the newest edition (released 2/12) pictured here. For example, the Collaborative's CDS/QI Worksheets for documenting, analyzing, sharing and improving target-focused CDS strategies originated in this latest edition.  They are based on the "CDS Five Rights" framework articulated in the series - that is, getting the right information to the right people in the right formats through the right channels at the right times to improve care processes and outcomes.  The Collaborative helps stakeholders get these right.

Collaborative Goals

              • Add value to participants' target-focused CDS efforts and performance improvement results.
              • Accelerate the widespread use of clinical decision support approaches that improve performance on high priority care delivery objectives (e.g., those associated with provider reimbursement).
              • Foster cross-stakeholder collaboration necessary to achieve these goals.

Getting There from Here

Each chapter in the CDS guidebook above describes a key step in improving care delivery and outcomes with CDS, and begins with bulleted lists of tasks and key lessons critical to the step.  A document that collects these tasks and key lessons is included in the CDS/QI Resources (see under III. Access Other Resources).  This material provides the necessary context for the central focus of this CDS/PI Collaborative - i.e., documenting, sharing, analyzing and improving target-focused CDS strategies using the CDS/QI Worksheets. Collaborative participants share and discuss their CDS/QI worksheets and experiences in forms private to Collaborative participants. After 1.5 years of seed funding by CHCF, Collaborative activities are now increasingly focused on 'moving the needle' on specific quality measures.  More information about current and past projects is here.

Value Proposition for Collaborative Participants

Stakeholders in harnessing CDS to accelerate improvements in healthcare quality, safety, efficiency, costs, and patient/clinician satisfaction (e.g., providers, HIT suppliers, quality improvement organizations, payers) can benefit significantly from a more systematic and collaborative approach to addressing their respective interests in achieving this goal. More specific CDS/PI Collaborative benefits for various stakeholder groups are outlined here.

Participants

The Collaborative continues to grow almost daily; there are now over >250 individuals from the following organization types that have asked to participate in the Collaborative's activities:

  • >84 CDOs (health systems, hospitals, clinics)
  • 8 major EHR suppliers
  • Federal agencies: ONC, HRSA, AHRQ, CDC, Indian Health Service, NIH Clinical Center, VA
  • Society partners: HIMSS, Scottsdale Institute (SI), Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM), American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)
  • 32 other organizations, e.g. CDS and analytics suppliers, clinical transformation consulting firms, Beacons, RECs, HCCNs
Some of these participants have engaged deeply in developing and using the Collaborative's tools and processes, while others have mainly observed.  As Collaborative projects focus more on delivering measurable healthcare performance improvements, we will cultivate more on coordinated, results-oriented collaboration on specific targets.