Decision Support Systems

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) help to inform decisions by providing information at the point of care. CDSSs can be tremendously helpful tools in many different situations and circumstances, and often their use helps to improve patient outcomes. In addition, CDSSs can help to improve efficiency, effectiveness of care, quality, and safety. In this Assignment, you will analyze a scenario and describe the benefits and challenges of using a CDSS within the scenario. To prepare for this Assignment, review this week’s readings and websites. Then pick one scenario below to address for this week’s Assignment. The following three scenarios depict examples of the use of CDSSs: Scenario A You are a nurse on a busy medical unit. You are about to administer numerous medications to your patient who is suffering from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). You are required to use the bedside verification/bar code scanning system to access medications in the automated medication dispensing machine. The system indicates a dose of one of the medications is overdue. You contact the physician that a medication dose was missed earlier in the shift and receive instructions on how to proceed with the current medication, ie, increasing dose. Scenario B You work in the Emergency Room and respond to “Fall Response Team” overhead page in the lobby area. You transport to the ER and care for the visitor who has fallen. After the situation has calmed, you go to the employee portal and enter the data about the fall in the automated incident reporting system. This system pulls demographic information from the emergency room encounter for this patient, allows you to enter a paragraph summarizing the incident and automatically sends the information to the quality team responsible for reviewing all falls. Scenario C You are a physician in a busy clinic. You are seeing greater than 40 patients per day. Your clinic is involved in submitting quality measures to the state called “Community Measures”. The electronic medical record alerts you to health screenings needed for this patient. You remind this patient of the needed screenings and with the click of the button document that reminder. This information is available to staff to schedule his screenings. The data is also retrieved for sending summary data to the state. Your written assignments must follow APA guidelines. Be sure to support your work with specific citations from this week’s Learning Resources and additional scholarly sources as appropriate.