Creating Clinical Decision Support Rules and Patient Alerts

Implementing clinical decision support rules and tracking compliance with those rules helps your practice meet meaningful use criteria. To better understand meaningful use and its criteria, go to http://www.cms.gov/EHRIncentivePrograms/.

When you finalize an exam, an alert can prompt you to take an action if the exam meets a condition (Clinical Decision Support or CDS rule). For information on how to finalize individual or multiple exams, go to Finalizing EMRs.

To set up an alert, set up a condition for the alert at the Clinical Decision Support Setup window. A condition consists of one or more criteria, such as a diagnosis code, and a requirement or action, such as patient education. If the criteria match a patient’s problem list, medication list, demographics, or laboratory test results, the Patient Alert window opens when you finalize the exam.

After upgrading to ExamWRITER 12.0 or above, you must edit any ExamWRITER Clinical Decision Support templates that you created that contain ICD-9 codes and update them to include appropriate ICD-10 codes, instead. You do not need to edit any ExamWRITER Clinical Decision Support templates that Eyefinity created and that were provided to you within the program; those templates have already been updated to include appropriate ICD-10 codes.
  1. Click Tools and select Clinical Decision Support Setup.

    The Clinical Decision Support Setup window opens.

  2. To create a new condition, click New and type a name in the Condition Name text box.
  3. Record one or more criteria.

    • Recording multiple criteria for a condition lowers the chance of receiving an alert, since the exam has to meet all of the criteria. Creating multiple conditions, each with fewer criteria, increases the chance of meeting criteria.

    • To clear all fields, click Cancel.

  4. Type a requirement in the Requirement text box, such as an action to take.
  5. Type a link to a link to a website, if desired.
  6. Click Save and Exit to save the condition and close the window.

    After you create a condition, it is available from the Condition drop-down menu.

To delete a condition, select the condition from the Condition drop-down menu and click Delete.

After you set up one or more conditions, if the patient’s exam meets any of them, the Patient Alert window opens. If the exam meets multiple conditions, you will receive multiple alerts. Click Go to access any website listed, or click OK or Next Alert.

In addition to the procedure above, watch this video.