Article by Bill Siwicki, Healthcare IT News
The following is an excerpt of the article, highlighting the Redivus Health sepsis case study.
Seventy-four percent of healthcare provider organizations use clinical decision support (CDS) technology, according to a new study from Reaction Data, relying on CDS to make more informed medication orders (30 percent), lab orders (24 percent), medical imaging orders (20 percent), choosing wisely (13 percent) and other (13 percent).
The report polled interviewed 180 clinical, quality and IT healthcare leaders at in providers nationwide (91 percent were acute care facilities and 9 percent were ambulatory) to assess the state of clinical decision support technology in the U.S. healthcare industry today.
WHAT IS THE TREND
More than half (55 percent) of healthcare provider organizations use multiple clinical decision support systems, the Reaction Data study found. When it comes to future plans, 48 percent of organizations plan to keep multiple systems, 26 percent plan to standardize on one platform, and 26 percent are unsure.
At Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas City, Missouri, where transfer patients from various rural and community-based hospitals throughout the area are accepted, the provider noticed increased mortality from sepsis among such patients due to this time-sensitive and deadly condition not being diagnosed early enough.
Saint Luke’s worked with vendor Redivus Health to implement a sepsis screening program that operated outside the EHR to proactively address this problem. The nurse transfer team began using the Redivus clinical decision support platform in 2017. The goals of the pilot program were to identify sepsis patients at the transferring facilities, start treatment sooner and improve patient outcomes.
The clinical decision support platform enabled transfer nurses to identify significantly more (200-plus) sepsis cases by providing simple intuitive guidance, and it allowed for patients to receive time-critical treatment before being transported to a higher level of care.
Results of the six-month pilot program were stark. The clinical decision support platform helped identify 150 percent more sepsis patients; it decreased mortality by 30 percent, which led to approximately 20 lives saved; and it correctly identified and treated sepsis, increasing billing income by $70,000 per month.
