HIMSS23: Community Health Network Reduces Medication Warnings by 250K & Increases Alert Acceptance Using FDB PatientFirst™ Solutions

'TIGER'-endorsed session at HIMSS23 will also highlight how Community reduced override rates across 10 medication alerts from 92% to 76% in one year

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., April 6, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- FDB (First Databank, Inc.), the leading provider of drug knowledge that helps healthcare professionals make precise decisions, announced today that its customer Community Health Network, a nine-hospital health system in Central Indiana, will deliver an educational session at HIMSS23.

Community Health Network leaders will enlighten attendees on how they have leveraged FDB PatientFirst™ solutions to optimize medication decision support to enhance patient safety and further reduce the burden clinicians experience from having to respond to too many alerts.

The health system used FDB Targeted Medication Warnings™ with FDB CDS Analytics™, an FDB PatientFirst medication decision support solution, to identify and optimize 10 medication-related clinical decision support (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 Health Network 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.

The Community Health Network education session, titled "Reducing Clinician Burnout Through Decision Support That Actually Helps", is scheduled for 1-2 pm CST, Thursday, April 20, in McCormick Center, South Building, in Chicago. The session has been selected as one of ten TIGER (Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform) endorsed HIMSS23 education sessions. 

Community Health Network is a growing, non-profit, integrated delivery network with more than 200 sites of care throughout its region including surgery centers, home care services, MedChecks, behavioral health, and employer health services. HIMSS23 attendees will learn that as Community grew, the number of CDS alerts fired also expanded to where clinicians received more than 2.5 million messages per month across the health system—on average approximately nine alerts per patient encounter. This included both best practice alerts (BPAs) and medication alerts.

Last year, medication warnings began to represent the bulk, or 56%, of Community Health Network's total number of CDS alerts, and the override rate for medication-related alerts in the inpatient settings reached nearly 94%. Additionally, providers were frustrated by the near-constant lack of relevant guidance within the warnings. To tackle this now more pressing alert challenge, Community extended its alert optimization initiative to include medication alerts and partnered with FDB to deploy FDB Targeted Medication Warnings with FDB CDS Analytics to help make these alerts more patient-specific and actionable.

"Clinical decision support is crucial for protecting patients' safety and improving care quality, but paradoxically, it can negatively impact both of these imperatives when providers are inundated with guidance that is irrelevant to the patient or non-actionable," said Patrick McGill, MD, executive vice president and chief transformation officer at Community Health Network, who will be co-presenting at HIMSS23. "FDB PatientFirst solutions have helped us reduce the volume of medication-related alerts—now our most common type at Community—and improve the provider experience by offering more targeted guidance that can be followed at the time the alert is presented. Those improvements translate to safer and more effective care delivery."

Kate Rothenberg, MSN, RN, clinical decision support manager at Community Health Network, will co-present with McGill.

"HIMSS23 attendees are certain to return to their health systems after the conference with inspiration and a plan to increase the clinical and economic value of CDS at their organizations by tailoring messages based on clinical and patient-specific context," Rothenberg said. "Fortunately, as we have learned at Community, optimizing CDS becomes easier the more it is conducted and the benefits multiply exponentially. We have just scratched the surface with optimizing our medication-related alerts and look forward to more improvements in the coming years with the supportive guidance of FDB PatientFirst solutions."

Using Data to Drive Change

HIMSS23 attendees will hear Community's journey in creating a multicommittee governance structure around CDS, which never existed before. Nor did the health system have a data-driven process to review alerts to determine if they were effective, or if they could be modified or eliminated. McGill and Rothenberg will provide in-depth details on how a governance structure was implemented for their alert evaluation and modification processes and how the committees drove the action and meaningful change across the health system.

Attendees will also learn how Community's newly re-chartered medication alert governance committee (MAGC) used FDB AlertSpace^® analytics and CDS Analytics within FDB Targeted Medication Warnings to immediately visualize how medication-related CDS is being used across the system, across departments, and by individual clinicians, showing how providers are interacting with or dismissing alerts. At a glance, for example, reviewers could see how traditional hyperkalemia drug-drug interaction alerts were nearly universally overridden. By leveraging FDB Targeted Medication Warnings, they only fire based on the most recent lab value threshold. Community Health Network reduced this alert frequency by 56%. Similarly, the number of QT prolongation alerts presented to clinicians was decreased by 47%.

By first considering information specific to each patient, such as lab values and clinical risk scores, within the context of the current patient engagement, FDB Targeted Medication Warnings help clinical leaders ensure that only the most relevant medication alerts are presented to providers at the point of care and that the most pertinent information for each patient is elevated. This guidance reduces alert fatigue and helps caregivers take more meaningful action at the right moment in their workflow.

"Attendees at HIMSS will surely benefit from Community Health Network leaders sharing the substantial clinical and financial benefits they have achieved, particularly how they have reduced the volume of medication-related alerts and warnings to address clinician alert fatigue," said Bob Katter, president of FDB. "Providers are inundated with more data and evidence each year, and FDB PatientFirst solutions can help clinicians better prioritize that information to make the right medication decisions for their patients."

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.

About Community Health Network
Headquartered in Indianapolis, Community Health Network has been deeply committed to the communities it serves since opening its first hospital, Community Hospital East, in 1956.  Community Health Network puts patients first while offering a full continuum of healthcare services, world-class innovations, and a new focus on population health management. Exceptional care, simply delivered, is what sets Community Health Network apart and what makes it a leading not-for-profit healthcare destination in central Indiana. For more information about Community Health Network, please visit eCommunity.com.

Contacts:
Tara Stultz
Amendola Communications for FDB 
M: 440-225-9595
[email protected]

SOURCE First Databank