JT on EDM

I think alot about how decision management can be used to improve healthcare. Neil Versel is one of the bloggers I read in this space and he had a post this week called “A modest proposal” in which he repeated some comments about the failure of the medical profession to use Clinical Decision Support systems (CDS) to improve outcomes. He quoted Dr. Bill Bria, chairman of the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems:

Our profession has really stumbled on this one

I remain convinced that technolgy can, and will, make a big difference in the delivery of care and decision support is one way it can. Ensuring that, when a medical professional knows that he or she should make a decision they have tools and support to make the best possible decision. However there is another whole area of technology support for medical professionals – Clinical Decision Management if you like. These systems are working on behalf of the medical professionals to make decisions when there is no staff available (in automatic monitoring of patients, for instance) and when medical professionals don’t realize that a decision needs to be made (or when they appear to have forgotten). With the increasing desire to have patients monitor their own health and do so from home and the costs of having people come to hospitals unecessarily, clinical decision management would seem to be essential. Clinical decision management can reduce costs and improve results while also improving the patient’s experience and there are not many technologies that can say that…