CDS/PI Collaborative: Getting Better Faster-Together(SM)

HIMSS CDS Guidebook Excerpts

The tasks, key lessons, worksheets, and key lessons below are part of the HIMSS CDS Guidebook titled, Improving Outcomes with Clinical Decision Support: An Implementer’s Guide. The information below will help guide you in measuring your targeted intervention results and continuously refine your CDS program.

Chapter 9

Tasks

Develop for each intervention a plan for identifying, tracking and addressing on an ongoing basis: availability, use and usability, unintended behavior and effects, and outcomes (Worksheets 9-1 through 9-3);
Develop a plan for reporting intervention effects to pertinent stakeholders and supporting continuous monitoring and improvement (Worksheet 9-3);
Track victories and exceptional efforts, frequently communicating and leveraging them to sustain performance and set up enthusiasm for future CDS interventions;
Identify owners or responsible parties for all your CDS interventions and their content, and implement tools and processes to maintain and update intervention periodically and as needs arise (Worksheets 4-1, 9-4);
Apply what you learn from evaluation to continually enhance your CDS program’s interventions and increase their value to users and their impact on organizational goals and objectives. (Worksheet 9-5)

Key Lessons

Stakeholders and organizational leadership can help establish reasonable measurement intervals and expectations for improvement. Evaluating intervention effectiveness requires both quantitative and qualitative approaches.
Log files and other approaches to tracking intervention use can be helpful for monitoring intervention effects. Details of interest include: when and how the intervention was invoked, where the user and patient were at the time, when in the workflow it happened, and how the information delivered was handled and applied.
It is critical to iteratively refine interventions to improve their use and benefits. Improvement opportunities emerge from evaluation efforts, in concert with evolving capabilities in your CIS infrastructure and available CDS tools, new clinical knowledge, and the changing healthcare delivery environment.

Worksheets

You can find the corresponding worksheets for this chapter here:

4-1: CDS Knowledge Asset Inventory

9-1a: Metric Selection and Use

9-1b: Worksheet 9-1a continued

9-2a: Use and Usability Issues Log

9-2b: Worksheet 9-2a continued

9-3a: Performance against Objectives

9-3b: Worksheet 9-3a continued

9-4: Decision Log

9-5a: CDS Program Enhancement Plans

9-5b: Worksheet 9-5a continued