Centralizing Clinical Guidelines: The Implications of a Cloud-Based Clinical Guideline Repository for EMR End Users and Clinical Decision Support

Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is one of the most utilized tools within a health center. CDS affects workflows, patient/provider interfacing, effective provider documentation, and ultimately health outcomes for patients. Individually, health centers build CDS rules, a task that is both costly and time-consuming for an organization. These CDS rules need to reflect the most up-to-date clinical guidelines to provide patients with the best possible healthcare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) disseminates changes to evidence-based clinical guidelines through a decentralized method sometimes causing changes to go unnoticed, not be instituted in a timely fashion, and/or may not happen at all in today's resource-constrained healthcare environment. In partnership with the CDC and NACHC, three health center controlled networks (HCCNs) piloted the interfacing of a CDC-maintained, web-based clinical guideline repository with their EMR applications. This session will highlight the successes and challenges of this project and provide attendees with a roadmap detailing the applicability of this new and innovative work.

• Retrieve and consume an evidence-based guideline XML file for Chlamydia screening from a CDC web server.
• Process the XML file to create and/or update CDS for Chlamydia within an EMR, automatically checking for updates in real time.
• Provide CDS recommendations on Chlamydia screening and treatment to providers at the point of care.