This month, representatives for a new team of federal agencies, called the Clinical Decision Support Collaboratory, met to discuss clinical decision support efforts, as well as ways to share expertise and capitalize on recent work, Government Health IT reports.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Personalized Health Care Initiative hosted the organization's first meeting.
The working group is one of several recent policy developments that will use reminders, alerts and other technology to help providers and their patients make clinical decisions.
AHRQ Contracts
In related news, AHRQ awarded two contracts this month totaling $5 million to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and the Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut to develop, adopt and evaluate best practices in clinical decision support.
The facilities will define important clinical decision support tools and integrate the tools into two electronic health record systems. They then will study how providers use the tools and identify the benefits and drawbacks.
HHS Advisory Meeting on Clinical Decision Support
Meanwhile, work groups are preparing recommendations on clinical decision support for the American Health Information Community, an HHS health IT advisory group.
Draft recommendations, which likely will be revised before the group's April meeting, include:
- Identifying priorities for federally funded clinical decision support activities and plans for gauging their effectiveness;
- Supporting research to determine best practices for clinical decision support in EHR and personal health record systems;
- Developing a minimum set of personal patient data that would contribute to individualized care; and
- Creating clinical decision support knowledge repositories that are aligned with CMS' quality reporting and pay-for-performance initiatives (Ferris, Government Health IT, 3/28).