The burden of this pandemic has increased healthcare workers’ workload and significantly inflated healthcare costs. Thus, patients, care providers, and even health systems would face major issues owing to the shortage of medical professionals and medical equipment if the spread of this illness is not treated and controlled as soon as feasible. Moulaei (2022) argues that to treat and prevent the spread of illness effectively, and healthcare providers need to pay close attention to the first signs of COVID-19 infection. They argue that optimizing the use of the CDS system would help physicians make more informed decisions about patients’ diagnoses, treatments, and follow-ups more swiftly. As a result, physicians can make a correct diagnosis more rapidly and limit the outbreak. In the form of computerized alerts, reminders, patient reports, and clinical trial tools, the CDS system offers guidance, knowledge, and information to patients and healthcare professionals (Moulaei, 2022).
Technology in the medical field, namely health information technology, has simplified the delivery of high-quality, timely treatment. The Affordable Care Act requires healthcare providers to adopt and fully use health information technology to increase quality, improve patient outcomes, and reduce healthcare costs. According to the author Fry (2021), a learning health system prepared to traverse the increasingly complicated healthcare environment requires a fully developed electronic health record (EHR) with clinical decision support (CDS). At the point of care, clinicians may benefit from a wide range of integrated clinical decision-support technologies inside electronic health records (EHRs), which improve clinical decision-making by providing relevant information. Clinicians may utilize the EHR’s integrated CDS tool, the Best Practice Advisory (BPA) alert, to improve patient outcomes and operational efficiencies (Fry, 2021).
Implementing policies into practice is necessary to reach the intended goal; having policies in place is not enough. Gaining support from the key stakeholders is essential for successfully putting the plans into action. Establishing and communicating guiding concepts, norms, and policies to the whole healthcare workforce is essential (Akhloufi et al., 2022). The healthcare institution has to have weekly meetings with physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, nurse informaticists, and information technology specialists to develop an efficient CDS system and BPA alerts. Each week, the team will get together to discuss how they can improve the technology by adding new features that make them more user-friendly and reduce the number of mistakes that may be made during its use. Additionally, the weekly meetings will also provide training on the efficient use of technology (Akhloufi et al., 2022).
Planning for the implementation may begin after meetings and training sessions have been held, with the development team discussing the project’s aims and objectives. When the strategy is ready, the development team will work with a system vendor to figure out how to best integrate technology to meet the goals (Akhloufi et al., 2022). Vendors of these systems will roll out a beta version, or minimum viable product, so that healthcare organizations may test it out and offer feedback. As a result of this feedback, vendors will better understand the demands of healthcare teams and may make necessary adjustments to the system. A CDS tailored to the requirements of both patients and healthcare professionals is essential for improved health outcomes (Akhloufi et al., 2022).
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