Poor CDS EHR Integration Negatively Impacts Patient Care, Survey Finds

While clinicians find third-party solutions useful for clinical decision support (CDS), EHR workflow integration is key for clinicians to apply insights, according to data from Wakefield Research conducted on behalf of health IT vendor Insiteflow.

Of the 250 clinicians surveyed for the report, 94 percent said not having easily accessible insights from third-party solutions affects patient care negatively.

When patient-specific insights are not easy to access:

• 53 percent of clinicians surveyed reported that patients start treatment too late.
• 52 percent reported patients spend additional time in the hospital.
• 47 percent reported patients receive the wrong treatment plan.

Clinicians see value in external solutions for clinical decision support. Overall, 74 percent of clinicians reported changing an initial diagnosis or altering a treatment plan for a patient based on insights from solutions outside of their EHR platforms.

However, 82 percent of those surveyed noted that it is difficult to harness these external opportunities for care improvement while working in their EHR.

The caregivers had to use disparate methods to access multiple external sources of insights, including leaving their EHR and signing into a separate site. Almost all surveyed providers (98 percent) reported missing opportunities to provide better patient care, save patient lives, and receive timely reimbursement because patient-specific insights were not easier to use.

Additionally, 94 percent of surveyed clinicians reported that learning how to access and use patient-specific insights from different external solutions contributes to feelings of fatigue and burnout.

Clinicians reported having six to 20 or more external solutions. They noted that they did not take advantage of the insights for the following reasons: accessing them is too time-consuming (43 percent), not intuitive (39 percent), too difficult (27 percent), or they forget (31 percent).

The survey found that 80 percent of clinicians report sometimes overlooking access to third-party solutions, with nearly 50 percent of clinicians overlooking third-party solutions often or all the time.

According to the report, each additional CDS solution compounds workflow problems.

“With the rise of AI, we expect the landscape of third-party decision-support solutions to grow significantly, further complicating the EHR workflow, which in turn complicates the clinicians’ ability to access patient-specific insights,” the authors wrote.