Clinical Decision Support (CDS)
Clinical Decision Support (CDS) products support clinicians in their complex decision-making processes. They can provide reminders for medical events, increasing adherence to clinical guidelines, suggesting cheaper medication alternatives, and improving the quality of clinical documentation. CDS can also play a role in medication-related decisions by running drug allergy checks, dose guidance, and drug-drug interaction checks. Some CDS products are also more customizable so that providers can build their own tooling to improve their care workflows and reduce manual work, while receiving relevant guidance.
Inferscience Transcript
Product Usage: Inferscience is used as a sidecar within athenahealth to suggest diagnosis codes and highlight missed areas during patient visits, predominantly for new providers.
Strengths: Inferscience seamlessly integrates with athenahealth, offers effective clinical specificity, supports risk adjustment efforts and is cost-effective for small organizations.
Weaknesses: The tool wasn’t optimized for pre-visit or chart prep usage, took too long to load outside of the patient visit context, and sometimes produced irrelevant or illogical suggestions.
Overall Judgment: Inferscience’s integration with athenahealth and its usefulness for new providers were significant advantages, but limitations in its utility for chart preparation and occasional inaccuracies in its suspecting algorithm led to the eventual use of an internally developed solution.
