There were many examples of clinical decision support (CDS) software currently on the market that could be leveraged to address Stage 3 Meaningful Use on the expo floor of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2016. During HIMSS, Ascendian Healthcare Consulting CEO Shawn McKenzie sat down with itnTV and discussed how and why CDS should be integrated into the radiology workflow.
“I think it’s great that we can use technology to help guide decisions and then move the process for patient care down the line,” he told itnTV. “There are many flavors of clinical decision support, the first of which is alerting. We alert that there is a contraindication, for example, for something that has been in service for a lot of years. And then there is the learning process. As we begin collecting data and correlate information, we are able to use that information that will help with learning — what is the best treatment plan? What is the best order set? I think that learning is the next phase; clinicians can use clinical decision support, click on it and learn, and educate on the best practice, appropriateness and so on.”
McKenzie went on to say that the actual intervention, the interventional clinical decision support, is guiding the user down a pathway that is known to provide the best outcomes, based on massive amounts of data. “This is not just how one organization feels, this is a correlation of a lot of information. This is creating an order template based on certain pathology, or certain disease process. This is an added tool in the tool belt,” he stressed.
He feels that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to be a good thing. “Take, for example, IBM Watson, and how it’s starting to correlate information for AI activity,” McKenzie said. “They have a lot of data. However, I don’t see this taking the place of physicians. You have to have that human element involved. There are dimensions that it might not pick up. It definitely is a tool that will be added to the arsenal for diagnosis.
“The thing about clinical decision support that we all talk about that’s really important is getting the appropriate information to the appropriate caregiver through a lot of different channels, no matter the modality, whether it’s a phone or a mobile device,” he continued. “You can’t always log into an electronic health record that has a clinical decision support module, it has to be something available, and then being able to create the intervention. Provide information for intervention, and it has to be the right carrier. The right time, the right channel, the right intervention. I think that’s where it is going, and it’s evolving quickly.”
McKenzie closed the interview by stating that in healthcare right now, there is a lot going on. “There’s a lot of noise, there’s a lot of spinning plates going on right now.”
To see more of the video inteview with McKenzie, visit http://bit.ly/1X0oAN3
Watch the VIDEO "Clinical Decision Support Requirements for Cardiac Imaging," a discussion with Rami Doukky, M.D., system chair, Division of Cardiology, professor of medicine, Cook County Health and Hospitals System, Chicago, discusses the new CMS requirements for clinical decision support (CDS) appropriate use criteria (AUC) documentation in cardiac imaging starting on Jan. 1, 2018. He spoke at the 2017 American Society of Nuclear Cardiology (ASNC) Today meeting.
May 21, 2025 
