NRS 433V Introduction To Nursing Research

Discuss the benefits and drawback of clinical decision support systems, including the challenges of avoiding alert fatigue. Considering your interactions with patients and systems in the clinical environment, what best practices related to human factors and user-centered design would you recommend to designers of such systems?

Clinical Decision Support System: Pros and Cons

The clinical decision support system (CDS) provides a number of benefits in healthcare. Dose dependent drug administration errors are often encountered in clinical settings especially with children and aged patients, leading to serious consequences. Clinical decision support systems provide healthcare professionals an easy access to drug specific dosage information and medical information related to patients’ health scenario. CDS provides diagnostic information to health professionals to identify differential diagnosis in times of clinical emergency, thereby reducing misdiagnosis (Roshanov et al., 2013). Easy access of CDS within the clinical workflow increases efficiency of health providers in patient care with high patient satisfaction and improved time management.

Increased technological reliance has resulted in drawbacks of CDS. Medical m monitoring devices provide sensory warning signals to clinicians to act on unsafe circumstances. Most of these alerts are inconsequential and therefore need to be avoided. However, bothersome alert signals also get ignored by clinicians which cause serious health issues in patients (Nanji et al., 2014). Excess reliance on technology reduces critical thinking and analytical abilities of clinicians.

Challenges of alert fatigue needs to be reduced to ensure success of CDS. The designers of CDS need to specify the alert signals to minimize inconsequential alerts. Drug interaction alerts need to be customized within computerized entry according to severity of the clinical condition. The CDS designers need to make the severely consequential alerts more interruptive. Alert signals can be redesigned and modified in tabulated format to increase responsiveness by clinicians thereby reducing prescription errors.

References

Nanji, K. C., Slight, S. P., Seger, D. L., Cho, I., Fiskio, J. M., Redden, L. M.,  & Bates, D. W. (2014). Overrides of medication-related clinical decision support alerts in outpatients. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 21(3), 487-491.

Roshanov, P. S., Fernandes, N., Wilczynski, J. M., Hemens, B. J., You, J. J., Handler, S. M., & Garg, A. X. (2013). Features of effective computerised clinical decision support systems: meta-regression of 162 randomised trials. Bmj, 346, f657.