How Community Health Network is using Analytics to Streamline its Clinical Decision Support

Clinical decision support can be a complicated issue. It is one Community Health Network has been managing for several years. The health system has more than 200 sites of care around Indianapolis and Central Indiana, including nine specialty and acute care hospitals where care is delivered by hundreds of physicians and other clinicians.

THE PROBLEM

Like all care providers, these physicians and clinicians are extremely busy, and there has been considerable evidence that responding to an overabundance of CDS alerts generated by electronic health records has contributed to their burnout over the last few years.

Therefore, one of the issues healthcare organizations must be cognizant of when developing or implementing CDS is the impact on the end user, said Dr. Patrick McGill, executive vice president and chief analytics officer at Community Health Network.

"We also must determine what action we want them to take when they receive the alert," he said. "In short, the main problem that we are always trying to solve is ensuring we are presenting the right alert, at the right time, in the right place in the workflow, for the right person, in the right situation.