Clinical decision support (CDS) equips health care providers with computerized recommendations to assist in the delivery of optimal care.
Vanderbilt Health has a long history of creating unique biomedical informatics solutions to aid the clinical enterprise’s patient care mission, including clinical decision support. These CDS resources are embedded in our information systems, empowering clinicians to have timely and valuable resources at the point of care.
Working with data from Vanderbilt Health’s clinical systems, CKM applies knowledge management principles to CDS efforts, including externalizing and organizing CDS rules, applying robust metadata to facilitate discovery, identifying relationships between content, and appending synthesized evidence. Institutional knowledge gleaned form these processes is maintained in an archive for ongoing consultation. This approach promotes a deeper understanding of the knowledge and local practice embedded in the systems.
Recent CDS collaborations include working with Health IT to quality-check and refine the Word Cloud tool, which supports Vanderbilt Health's clinical decision-making efforts. The Word Cloud uses natural language processing within the electronic health record system to provide a quick visual representation of a patient's medications, comorbidities, procedures, and other clinical attributes over time. CKM contributes medical expertise, knowledge of controlled vocabularies, and critical appraisal skills to improve the tool's data integrity.
For additional information on CKM's CDS-related contributions, please see the following pages: