FDB Marks Achievements in Optimizing Medication CDS through a Patient-Centric Approach at HIMSS23

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Apr 13, 2023, 10:00 ET

Discover how FDB PatientFirst™ is helping healthcare providers amplify the most relevant medication decision support alerts to improve clinician experience & patient safety

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., April 13, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- FDB (First Databank, Inc.), the leading provider of drug knowledge that helps healthcare professionals make precise decisions, will have a strong presence at the 2023 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition in Chicago, April 17-20, with a focus on FDB PatientFirst™ solutions. FDB will be showcasing how these solutions are helping hospitals and health systems optimize medication decision support to amplify alerts that are most relevant to the patient at hand while decreasing overall alert volume through a patient-centric approach.

Attendees at HIMSS23 educational sessions and visitors to FDB booth #1920 in the HIMSS23 exhibit hall will discover how leading hospitals and health systems are using FDB PatientFirst solutions to leverage patient-specific data (e.g., lab results and clinical risk scores) to ensure that medication alerts are presented to clinicians only when relevant to the patient in the current clinical context. This helps to lessen the burden of over-alerting that clinicians face and improves medication decision making for better patient care and safety.

Healthcare organizations today are challenged to help clinicians manage an increasing number of clinical decision support alerts within their workflows, many of which are not patient-specific. Responding to a plethora of generalized alerts with every patient encounter can become overwhelming. It can distract clinicians and lead them to miss or inadvertently override alerts that may be important to their patients.

"By leveraging patient and drug data, including lab and pharmacogenomic results, and analytics capabilities through FDB PatientFirst solutions, hospitals and health systems are making medication alerts more relevant and actionable," said Virginia Halsey, senior vice president of product management for FDB. "They are taking significant steps toward reducing the total number of alerts that clinicians receive, lessening alert fatigue, and elevating the information clinicians need most to make the best medication decisions for each individual patient."

Medication alerts prompt clinicians to review potential safety issues, such as contraindicated drug combinations and drug-allergy conflicts. These alerts account for a significant portion of all CDS alerts. FDB PatientFirst solutions, which include FDB Targeted Medication Warnings™ and FDB Pharmacogenomic CDS, draw upon patient data and trusted FDB drug data to help narrow the instances when these alerts will fire in the electronic health record. Alerts are now based on the unique circumstances of the patient at the time of care. FDB CDS Analytics™, a capability offered within FDB Targeted Medication Warnings, helps health systems identify alerts for optimization based on the frequency of clinician override or acceptance, and to monitor the performance of alerts.

"CDS Heroes" - Leading Organizations Share
CDS Optimization Success with FDB PatientFirst Solutions

HIMSS23 attendees will gain inspiration for their own patient-centric CDS optimization initiatives from the success of peers. Attendees can learn more by participating in the following educational sessions or by asking for details at FDB booth #1920:

Managing Medication Alerts and Reducing Clinician Burnout. Community Health Network, a nine-hospital health system in Central Indiana, used FDB Targeted Medication Warnings with FDB CDS Analytics, to identify and optimize 10 medication-related CDS alerts in 2022, making these alerts more patient-specific, relevant to the immediate clinical context, and more actionable by clinicians. By modifying these 10 alerts in the first year, Community reduced medication alert volume by 250,000 while decreasing the rate at which clinicians override such alerts from 92% to 76%. The reductions in the override rate across the optimized alerts coincided with an increased acceptance of these medication alerts, resulting in more than 200,000 potentially harmful medications being avoided. More details are available here.

The Community Health Network session, "Reducing Clinician Burnout Through Clinical Decision Support That Actually Helps" will be from 1-2 p.m. CST, Thursday, April 20, at McCormick Place, South Building, Level 5, S503.

Optimizing Drug Decisions with Pharmacogenomics. Frederick Health, an independent mid-sized healthcare network in Maryland, will describe how they integrated FDB Pharmacogenomic CDS within MEDITECH Expanse Genomics to become one the first organizations to enable any physician to order, result, and display discrete patient genetic information and pharmacogenomic decision support. Pharmacogenomic CDS provides actionable guidance for appropriate drug therapy, to prevent patient harm, and to help ensure effective treatments.

The Frederick Health session, "How and Why to Launch a Precision Medicine Program" will be from 10-11 a.m. CST, Thursday, April 20, at McCormick Place, South Building, Level 4, S406 A.

Increasing Medication Safety with Drug-Drug Alert Acceptance. Lehigh Valley Health Network, an integrated health system in Pennsylvania, has leveraged FDB Targeted Medication Warnings to achieve a greater than 60% acceptance rate for drug-drug interaction alerts for hyperkalemia, while significantly reducing alert volume, through customized, patient-specific, and relevant medication decision support. More details are available here or at FDB booth #1920.

Are You a CDS Hero?

HIMSS23 attendees whose organizations are optimizing medication CDS to increase the relevance of alerts, reduce alert fatigue, improve patient safety and avoid wasted resources are invited to share their success stories at FDB booth #1920 and be recognized as CDS Heroes.

Intuitively Customizing Medication Alerts & Change Management with FDB AlertSpace^®.

Complementing FDB PatientFirst solutions, FDB AlertSpace also enables healthcare organizations to customize alerts for their environments so that clinicians do not miss critical guidance due to over-alerting. FDB will share information about how Parkview Health in Indiana uses FDB AlertSpace analytics dashboards to proactively manage alert fatigue. Parkview Health's data-driven evaluation resulted in nearly 9,000 or 17.3% fewer drug-drug interaction alerts per week. Read more details here.

Other Challenges that FDB Solutions Address

FDB representatives at HIMSS23 will explain how FDB solutions help healthcare professionals address other major care delivery and operational challenges facing health systems and pharmacies today. These include:

Bringing Greater Choice & Value to ePrescribing. FDB Vela™ is a new cloud-native electronic prescribing network that enables the seamless flow of critical medication prescription information, benefits verification, and clinical decision support between prescribers, payers, pharmacies, and hubs. Celebrating its first anniversary at HIMSS23, FDB Vela empowers innovation, reduces barriers to participation, and increases the cost-effectiveness of electronic prescribing.
Increasing Care Equity and Reducing Health Disparities. One of the barriers to increasing care equity and reducing health disparities among at-risk patient populations is a lack of understanding and adherence to drug therapies. Some knowledge gaps may be attributed to English language fluency challenges. FDB's Meducation^® solution helps increase patients' healthcare and drug literacy through personalized and translated medication instructions—including simplified monographs, Universal Medication Schedule (UMS) calendars visuals, administration-specific videos, support for multilingual labeling, and more. All material is available at a 5^th- to 8^th-grade reading level and in more than 30 languages.
Combating Supply Chain Disruption. Hospitals and health systems easily maintain adequate stock levels with clear visibility into their entire ecosystem of medical supply and device products and vendors with the new FDB Prizm™ portal.

"Just Pop In" for Popcorn & Conversation

The FDB team will be on hand at booth #1920 in the HIMSS23 Exhibit Hall to answer attendees' questions and discuss their organizations' medication decision support challenges.

Book a meeting here.

Attendees are also invited to join FDB and Zynx Health for a casual in-booth reception:

"Just Pop In" Reception
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
4:30-6 p.m.
McCormick Place Convention Center
South Building
Hall A
Booth #1920
Complimentary gourmet popcorn gift to all attendees
Register to win an iPad Air*

*Must be present to win.

About FDB
FDB (First Databank) creates and delivers the world's most powerful drug knowledge that ignites, inspires, and illuminates critical medication decisions. We collaborate with our partners to help improve patient safety, operational efficiency, and health outcomes. Our drug databases drive healthcare information systems that serve the majority of hospitals, physician practices, pharmacies, payers, and all other areas of healthcare and are used by millions of clinicians, business associates, and patients every day. Please visit us at https://www.fdbhealth.com/, or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

About Hearst Health
The mission of Hearst Health is to help guide the most important care moments by delivering vital information into the hands of everyone who touches a person's health journey. Care guidance from Hearst Health reaches the majority of people in the U.S. The Hearst Health network includes FDB (First Databank), Zynx Health, MCG, Homecare Homebase, and MHK. Hearst also holds a minority interest in the precision medicine and oncology analytics company M2Gen. Follow Hearst Health on Twitter @HearstHealth or LinkedIn @Hearst-Health.