VHA CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT

Clinical Decision Support (CDS)

CDS provides timely, patient-specific knowledge to clinicians, staff, or patients to improve health outcomes. It enhances decision-making by integrating intelligently filtered data into clinical workflows at the point of care. CDS tools include alerts, reminders, clinical guidelines, order sets, data summaries, documentation templates, and diagnostic support resources. These tools aim to improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of healthcare delivery. (Clinical Decision Support | HealthIT.gov)

This CDS project supported the accurate design and firing of alerts within VHA’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. A patient safety system performs cross-checks to generate these alerts for clinical review. However, clinicians often dismiss alerts without reading them, especially if alerts are frequent or irrelevant. By increasing alert accuracy, we help build clinician trust and reduce alert fatigue. In multiple projects, we enabled VHA EHR systems to deliver reliable CDS functions and drug-drug interaction alerts. Many alerts now rely on CHDR, which shares prescription data across VA and DoD systems for safer treatment decisions.We matched allergy reactants, allergy reactions, and medications to standards like RxNorm and SNOMED CT.

Across our projects, we provide Clinical Decision Support (CDS) so that VA’s EHR systems can provide clinicians with CDS functions and drug-drug interaction alerts.

As a result, clinicians access more complete data for CDS across departments, enhancing patient safety and care coordination. We continually deliver high-quality, standardized data to improve CDS performance and reliability. Additionally, we analyzed White Paper submissions and provided clinical and terminology feedback for several specialties. These included Gastroenterology, Hepatitis C, Cardiac Catheterization, Mental Health Homelessness, and Tobacco Assessment and Cessation.