Clinical Decision Support

At the vast UPMC health system in Pittsburgh, Francis X. Solano, M.D., and Jim Venturella have been deeply involved with a broad cadre of their colleagues in helping to support practicing physicians in the organization’s medical groups with the evidence-based information needed to improve care quality—and document that improvement

Point-of-care decision support technologies such as electronic order sets are central to standardizing care practices and paving the way for the practice of evidence-based medicine. By providing physicians with a checklist to guide care decisions as well as direct access to supporting medical evidence, electronic order sets also help reduce errors and improve quality and core measures performance.

As David Share, M.D. and his colleagues at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan collaborate forward with local providers to master care management and utilization strategies, the criticality of leveraging analytics thoughtfully becomes ever-more-apparent. We’ll be discussing these issues in our upcoming Healthcare Informatics webinar on Sept. 25, and learning from the experiences of some of the most pioneering organizations nationwide.

A committee impaneled by the Institute of Medicine has produced a report aimed at pushing the healthcare industry towards continuous performance improvement and continuous learning. And Paul Tang, M.D., speaks with HCI’s Mark Hagland about the implications for today’s healthcare leaders.

I think Henry Ford articulated it best when he said, "Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely." We all learn from our mistakes, and I think one area rife with redos and re-tinkering of strategies is the health information exchange (HIE) market.