Technology Application Used in Health Care to Facilitate Decision Making
Decision making remains as one of the critical aspects associated with the health care industry today, as it seeks to ensure that the quality of care offered to individual patients is maximized at all times. The use of technology has been noted as a pivotal contributor to effective decision making; thus, promoting health care service providers to shift their focus to the use of specific technology applications. One such form is the clinical decision support system (CDSS). The clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a technological application that allows for data analysis with the aim being towards ensuring that service providers can make effective decisions on how to improve on the quality of care (Zolhavarieh, Parry, & Bai, 2017). The use of this system has been considered as being advantageous in seeking to ensure that the clinical decisions made reflect on the interests of the patients.
The use of the CDSS, as part of health care service delivery, enables a workflow through which to provide the necessary assistance at any given time of care while, at the same, giving care plan recommendations (Parry, & Zolhavarieh, 2018). The expectation is that health care providers using the CDSS will be in a better position to make effective decisions that reflect on improving the quality of care that the patient receives. Additionally, the CDSS also works towards ensuring that health service providers can make decisions while taking into consideration potentially dangerous drug interactions that may impact on the expected outcomes. Generally, this means that the use of CDSS, as a technological application, helps increase efficiency concerning the decisions made while ensuring that the services offered to match the best possible outcomes.
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Application’s Impact on Quality of Decision Making
The impact of the clinical decision support system (CDSS) on quality can be seen from multiple perspectives, which seek to highlight the application as being one of the most effective technological tools in the health care environment. The first impact of the CDSS is the fact that it paves the way for the provision of best practice while ensuring that the quality of health services offered is maximized, which is the ultimate goal of health care service delivery (Cánovas-Segura, Morales, Juarez, Campos, & Palacios, 2019). An example can be seen concerning the minimization of errors in service delivery, especially in areas such as medication prescription and adverse drug events. Health providers using the CDSS when making their health care decisions find it much easier to adopt best practices while seeking to ensure that the patient is accorded the best quality of care.
The second impact of the application on quality of decision making is that it ensures that health providers have access to all necessary documentation that would allow them to make effective decisions. The adoption of the CDSS helps to increase the possibility of document accuracy and completeness, which is one of the lacking aspects when using manual systems of information (Yan & Lindgren, 2018). Consequently, this means that health providers, using CDSS, have access to not only accurate documentation but also documents that are complete to help define the decisions that they take. Lastly, the application also impacts the quality of decision making by ensuring that all the data used when making decisions are evidence-based (Castaneda et al., 2015). Having factual data serves as a guarantee that the decisions made would reflect on current best practices as part of ensuring that patients receive the best quality of care.
Process of Selection and Implementation of the Application
The method of selecting the application is often determined by the needs presented within the health care institution while focusing on the existing gaps in the quality of decisions being made. The identification of the gaps helps in determining the type of application that would be needed to improve the decision making processes within the institution. After the form has been selected, based on the expected needs, the next process will be the implementation. Implementation of the certificate will occur in two phases. The first phase is the pilot phase, where the user is implemented on a trial basis. That helps in identification and sorting out some of the critical challenges that are likely to impact on its effectiveness. The second phase of the implementation is the full implementation and use of the application. In this phase, the staff will be taken through training on how to use the system in their bid to making quality decisions that reflect on the quality of care they offer.
Costs Associated with the Application
The overall cost associated with the implementation of the clinical decision support system (CDSS) is $23,316, which covers the cost of acquisition and full implementation of the system. However, the health institution is also expected to incur extra charges in training the staff to ensure that they understand how to use this system effectively. The cost of training CDSS users is $1,060. The expectation is that the training will enhance overall capacity for the staff to improve on the quality of decisions that they make by ensuring that they utilize the functions of the CDSS.
Nurses' Role (s) in Selection and Evaluation of the Application
The roles of nurses in the selection and evaluation of the application cannot be ignored, taking into account that they are key stakeholders, who much be consulted decisions regarding the use are made. In the selection and evaluation of the application, the Role of nurses is to give their views and understanding of how the system ought to operate while seeking to determine whether it is working in this manner. Nurses are some of the vital health providers that will be expected to use the CDSS after it has been implemented as part of the health care decision-making process. Consequently, they must likely be given an opportunity allowing them to select the application that they consider as being most effective for them to use as part of enhanced service delivery.
In the evaluation of the application, the Role of nurses is to provide their feedback on some of the key strengths and weaknesses that they were able to note when using the application. While considering that nurses will be the primary users of the application, it is, therefore, essential to take their views into consideration concerning what they think as being strengths and weaknesses of the application. Additionally, it would also be crucial to create an avenue through which nurses can provide their recommendations and ideas for improvement of the application. The recommendations will help to ensure that the application builds on its overall capacity to deliver on the best possible outcomes concerning improving the quality of care services offered to the patients.
References
Cánovas-Segura, B., Morales, A., Juarez, J. M., Campos, M., & Palacios, F. (2019). A lightweight acquisition of expert rules for interoperable clinical decision support systems. Knowledge-Based Systems , 167 , 98-113.
Castaneda, C., Nalley, K., Mannion, C., Bhattacharyya, P., Blake, P., Pecora, A., ... & Suh, K. S. (2015). Clinical decision support systems for improving diagnostic accuracy and achieving precision medicine. Journal of clinical bioinformatics , 5 (1), 4.
Parry, D., & Zolhavarieh, S. J. (2018). A knowledge quality assessment model for clinical decision support systems. In MEDINFO 2017: Precision Healthcare through Informatics Proceedings of the 16th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics (pp. 983-986). IOS Press.
Yan, C., & Lindgren, H. (2018). A Generic Approach for Data Management and End-User Development of Clinical Decision Support Systems . Umeå Universitet.
Zolhavarieh, S., Parry, D., & Bai, Q. (2017). Issues associated with the use of semantic web technology in knowledge acquisition for clinical decision support systems: a systematic review of the literature. JMIR medical informatics , 5 (3), e18.
