Clinical Decision Support for Medication Management and Adherence

This three-year, grant funded project will be conducted by the Division of Clinical Informatics in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Duke University Medical Center. The project seeks to improve care quality and safety in an ambulatory care setting through clinical decision support for evidence-based (EB) pharmacotherapy delivered as point-of-care reports to clinic-based practitioners and as population health-based alerts to care managers. This project will build upon a regional Health Information Exchange (HIE) network created to connect providers serving 37,000 Medicaid beneficiaries from both rural and urban settings in a 5 county region in the Northern Piedmont of North Carolina. This network includes 16 private practices, 3 federally qualified health centers, 5 rural health centers, 3 urgent care facilities, 10 government agencies, 5 hospitals, and 2 cross-disciplinary care management teams. The proposed information system will be based on an emerging standard for decision support and will utilize routinely available claims and scheduling data in order to serve as a replicable model for broader use of decision support for medication management. Increased availability and use of decision support tools for medication management can be expected to reduce medication errors, improve health care quality at an acceptable cost, and augment disease management for patients and populations.