5 Benefits of Clinical Decision Support in the ED

High-acuity patients and surging patient volumes combine to make the emergency department one care setting with high variability and potential for medical error. The ED clinical team can be greatly helped by tools that can support efficiency while reducing these risks. T-System offers robust clinical decision support from Isabel Healthcare and PEPID that can calculate adult and pediatric dosing, identify possible diagnoses and drug interactions, and provide evidence-based recommendations.

Below are five reasons you should use clinical decision support in your ED:

1. Reduce the risk of medication errors. More than 37 percent of harmful pediatric medication errors are caused by an improper dose or quantity.
    
2. Avoid misdiagnoses. Approximately 10-30 percent of medical errors are diagnosis errors. Decision support can drastically improve that margin of error. For example, when key information from 50 challenging Clinical Pathology Conference cases reported in The New England Journal of Medicine was entered in the system, Isabel Healthcare provided the accurate diagnosis 96 percent of the time.
    
3. Give your entire care team consistent support. Remove for your staff the burden of finding the right information. By providing the entire care team with the same trusted resources, you are putting the most reliable, up-to-date answers at their fingertips.
    
4. Improve efficiency and patient throughput. By rapidly determining the correct dose, calculation or diagnosis, you can order tests and make referrals as appropriate, thus saving time and eliminating unnecessary costs for the patients and the ED.
    
5. Access all information in one place. Toss out those outdated reference books. The ability to access the most current information resources in a single location eliminates the need for multiple logins or investing in additional hardware.