Study: Clinical Decision Support EHR Alerts Can Lower Health Costs, Complications

When physicians follow the recommendations of context-specific clinical decision support at the point of care, clinical and financial outcomes should improve, according to new research.

Researchers, in the recent study, published in the American Journal of Managed Care, examined more than 26,000 patient encounters to determine whether utilization of clinical decision support (CDS) is correlated with improved patient clinical and financial outcomes. In the treatment group, the provider adhered to all CDS recommendations, while in the control group, the provider did not adhere to CDS recommendations.

The analysis examined the associations between adherence to recommendations from Choosing Wisely—a clinical decision support platform from Stanson Health—embedded into clinical decision support alerts, and four measures of resource use and quality.  They found and concluded:

• Encounters in which providers adhered to all alerts had significantly lower total costs, shorter lengths of stay, a lower probability of 30-day readmissions, and a lower probability of complications compared with nonadherent encounters.
• Full adherence to Choosing Wisely alerts was associated with savings of $944 from a median encounter cost of $12,940.
• Health systems should consider real-time CDS interventions as a method to encourage improved adoption of evidence-based guidelines.

In 2012, the ABIM Foundation—a healthcare quality organization devoted to advancing medical professionalism—introduced the Choosing Wisely (CW) initiative, a voluntary effort by more than 70 physician subspecialty societies to identify commonly used low-value services, with the intent to stimulate provider–patient discussions about appropriate care and thereby reduce low-value tests and treatments. But initial research of the CW recommendations found that providers had difficulty interpreting guidelines and evaluating patient risk.

To this end, the researchers attested that an EHR (electronic health record) infrastructure could provide real-time computerized clinical decision support to inform healthcare providers when their care deviates from evidence-based guidelines. CDS comprises a variety of tools, including computerized alerts and reminders with information such as diagnostic support, clinical guidelines, relevant patient information, diagnosis-specific order sets, documentation templates, and drug–drug interactions.

For this study, CW recommendations were implemented in the EHR at a large academic health system in the form of 92 alert-based CDS interventions, both inpatient and ambulatory. When initiating a potentially inappropriate order, a provider received real-time notification of deviation from a CW recommendation. That provider then had the option to cancel, change, or justify the order, if he or she agreed with the alert’s recommendation in the context of the individual patient.

It should be noted that two of the study’s authors are employed by Optum, which is a licensed reseller of Stanson Health, including its Choosing Wisely alert content evaluated in this study. What’s more, another of the authors is employed by Cedars-Sinai, which is the major shareholder of Stanson Health.

In the end, the researchers recommended that health systems consider real-time CDS interventions as a method to encourage improved adoption of CW and other evidence-based guidelines. A meta-analysis of CDS systems concluded that by providing context-specific information at the point of care, the odds of providers adopting guideline recommendations are 112 times higher.

They concluded, “Our findings contribute to the evidence base surrounding the use of CDS and improvements in patient clinical and financial outcomes. Formal prospective cohort studies and randomized CDS intervention trials, perhaps randomizing providers assigned to receive CDS interventions, should be prioritized to help guide future provider strategies in regard to reducing low-value care.”