Clinical Decision Support Tools Help Doctors See Important Data

Anvita Health, a provider of clinical decision support tools, has unveiled at product suite that calculates all electronic health record Meaningful Use Stage 1 quality measures in real time, while also providing providers with in-depth analysis of patients' medical profiles.

The Anvita Health CDS Plus tools, which were introduced at the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Orlando, can analyze data from multiple sources, including EHRs, lab reports, and pharmacy and medical claims.

This multisource data analysis can be used to calculate any of the 44 clinical quality measures required to demonstrate the meaningful use of EHRs under the federal government's Stage 1 criteria. The Meaningful Use program determine's healthcare providers eligibility for stimulus incentive funds.

Anvita's tools analyze data on individual patients within seconds, or for populations of patients, such as those with chronic conditions, in minutes.

The tools can also use data from multiple sources to create what the company calls "smart problem lists," which provide doctors with prioritized lists of active diagnoses, drug treatments and lab results for each patient.

With EHRs and other clinical systems, "there's a lot of information--but what's the important stuff?" asked Anvita CEO Rich Noffsinger in a recent interview with InformationWeek.

The Anvita smart problem tool helps spotlight the most important data doctors need to provide the best care for the patient's current situation, Noffsinger said. That data might not involve the doctors seeing details about the flu the patient had three years ago, but it might highlight the appendectomy they had six years ago if it's relevant to the current problem, he said.

A patient often sees multiple doctors, and a physician wants to know all the meds a patient is on and all relevant treatments and diagnoses, not only to make better decisions about patients, but "also to look for gaps in care," he said.

Anvita's tools can be used to analyze and report on the care of groups of similar patients, such as those with chronic illnesses like type 2 diabetes. This type of analysis could help healthcare providers in the future if they participate in accountable care organizations. Under healthcare reform, ACOs could dramatically change pay structures for healthcare providers, replacing the current pay-per-service system with one that provides incentives for caregivers to improve patient outcomes.

Clinical decision support will play a huge role in accountable care organizations, Noffsinger said. "Healthcare providers could be financially rewarded for doing a good job in taking care of a population of patients, changing the dynamics from fee for service to making smarter, wiser choices."

Also, as the details of the next two Meaningful Use stages are worked out by the federal government, there are signs that the requirements for quality of care and measurement reporting will become more complex.

Clinical decision support was a small part of Stage 1, but "there are all kinds of indications that the bar will be raised in Stages 2 and 3, with a bigger emphasis on CDS," he said.

Anvita's CDS Plus tools have a customizable rules library and can be used in cloud environments or locally hosted settings.

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