A team of researchers validated an automated clinical decision support tool for kidney failure risk, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
The researchers — led by Lipika Samal, MD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston — built a system that would calculate a patient's kidney failure risk based on EHR data. The system uses the international health IT standards organization Health Level 7's Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture standard to extract data from the EHR.
The researchers completed a clinical case study, in which the system would display an alert and recommendation message based on kidney failure risk to EHR users in certain primary care practices. They deployed the clinical decision support application to 10 primary care clinics, and in one year, the tool processed 569,533 documents.
"Since Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture-based data extraction extends to any certified EHR, this demonstrates a successful modular approach to clinical decision support," the study authors concluded.