Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Clinical Decision Support Learning Network (PCOR CDS-LN)

Research Triangle Institute, Durham NC

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) can give patients and providers the power to make more informed health decisions. However, increasing investment in PCOR research has revealed a gap between the PCOR findings that are generated and the means for those findings to be effectively incorporated into clinical care. This gap in translating PCOR findings into practice can impede the delivery of high-quality evidence-based information to patients. Clinical decision support (CDS) plays a critical role in making key PCOR findings accessible and actionable. CDS is composed of software applications and services that engage patients, providers, and other caregivers to notify, remind, and/or alert them to particular patient needs, such as reminding that a routine screening test is due or alerting of potential interactions for a newly prescribed drug. Numerous barriers to the effective use of CDS still exist and must be overcome for PCOR findings to be incorporated into CDS at scale. Barriers include limited awareness and availability of PCOR findings; limited expertise with interpreting and embedding those findings into CDS; the lack of widely adopted standards for CDS; the still limited use of portals and personal health records by patients; the lack of a forum to promote stakeholder engagement for assessing barriers and facilitators to implementing PCOR findings in CDS; the lack of collaboration sites with appropriate tools; and the lack of a model for creating and managing authoritative best practice knowledge repositories. In response to these barriers, RTI proposes to develop a PCOR Clinical Decision Support Learning Network (PCOR CDS-LN) in which multiple public and private stakeholders can engage one another pursue the following objectives: 1. Accelerate collaborative learning opportunities by convening, implementing, and initiating operation of a multi-stakeholder CDS learning network; 2. Identify barriers and facilitators to the incorporation of PCOR findings in CDS, and develop recommendations for implementing PCOR findings in clinical workflows via CDS; 3. Monitor and measure the dissemination and use of PCOR findings in vendor-based and open source CDS tools, evaluate the effectiveness of the PCOR CDS-LN, and adapt its activities to increase effectiveness based on these findings; and 4. Develop a sustainability plan for ongoing operations of the PCOR CDS-LN.