Intelligent Analytics, Clinical Decision Support, and EMR As a Skill

It’s time for a quick Twitter round up where I highlight a few tweets from around the Twittersphere and add some of my own commentaries. I hope you’ll join in the comments and share your perspectives on these tweets.


I agree with Lalit that it’s clear that the patient owns the clinical data. The real problem is that many healthcare organizations don’t act like patients own it. We need that culture change to occur in many parts of healthcare. However, Lalit is aso correct that the data needs to be married to intelligent analytics if we want the data to be extremely useful for both patients and their care providers. We’re starting to see this happen.


I’ve often thought that CDS (Clinical Decision Support) is the oft forgotten feature of an EMR and that it likely should get a lot more attention than it does. Dr. Harvey is correct that the CDS inside an EMR is the largest feature that contributes to the intelligence of the EMR system. However, the CDS gets so little attention. I know that’s not true in many EMR implementations where vast committees scour the CDS to ensure that it satisfies the care requirements and guidelines they want to follow in their organization. However, CDS doesn’t get nearly enough press. I think that needs to change since much of what can be accomplished to improve care in the EHR is going to be CDS.


This was great to see Dr. Stewart acknowledge and highlight how learning to use an EMR is a skill that needs to be developed just like deliveriers and sutures are a skill to be developed. I’ve seen so many doctors who complain about their EHR, but they also chose not to spend the time learning how to develop the EMR skill. They just thought that they could start using it with no training, no real workflow evaluation, etc. Skills have to be developed and learned and that’s true with the EMR as well.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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