KLAS Performance Report on Clinical Decision Support Rates First Databank Highest Among Drug Database Vendors on Key Indic

Hospital Executives and Clinical Staff Surveyed To Understand Impact of Clinical Decision Support on Patient Care  

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- First Databank (FDB), a leading provider of drug knowledge that helps improve medication-related decisions to enhance clinical care, today announced that a KLAS Performance Report of healthcare providers in the US hospital market, Clinical Decision Support 2011: Understanding the Impact, released November 28, 2011, rated the company’s drug knowledge highest in nearly all key indicators. KLAS is an independent research firm that specializes in monitoring and reporting the performance of healthcare vendors.

The report is KLAS’ first formal measurement and evaluation of clinical decision support (CDS) tools and vendors. The survey of hospital-based executives and clinicians assessed opinions about CDS tool performance with the goal of understanding their impact on standardizing care, clinical decisions and patient outcomes. The report investigated multiple CDS solutions by type including Care Plans, Diagnostic Decision Support, Disease Reference, Drug Databases, Drug Reference, Order Sets, and Surveillance. In the drug database category, First Databank ranked as the most trusted evidence and achieved the highest ratings in key indicators including “information credibility,” “relevance of information,” “EMR integration,” “influence on decisions,” “standardization of care” and “overall meeting needs.”

“We are humbled by our clients’ reviews and pleased that KLAS has undertaken the effort to independently survey the increasingly important area of clinical decision support,” said Greg Dorn, MD, First Databank president and CEO. “The result is representative of FDB’s ability to innovate in the medication knowledge domain toward the goal of continually improving safety and outcomes for patients worldwide.”

An overriding theme indicated by providers in the report is that medication alert fatigue is a huge industry challenge that needs to be addressed to improve the impact of medication decision support on quality outcomes. Providers are looking for help from First Databank and other HIT organizations to improve their alert management.

“At FDB, we recognize that alert fatigue is clearly an issue preventing greater satisfaction with CDS tools including our own,” says Dorn. “We take this challenge seriously and have been diligently working to bring novel solutions to the market to address this industry problem.”

FDB has made significant progress in addressing the industry-wide challenge of alert fatigue in medication decision-support systems, including innovative advances in local customization of clinical alerts. Additionally, the company released several specific enhancements to its drug knowledge bases that minimize unnecessary alerts within EHR systems. These include specific severity level adjustments to certain drug-drug interaction pairs based on clinical evidence; increasing the threshold for duplicate therapy warnings for clinically reasonable combinations; extrapolating clinically reasonable minimum/maximum doses to age ranges not specifically cited in manufacturer package inserts; limiting drug-drug interactions to specific dosage forms or doses as clinically determined to be necessary; and refining drug-disease contraindications to more specific ICD-9 codes (to decrease broad code alerts).

About KLAS

KLAS is a research firm specializing in monitoring and reporting the performance of healthcare vendors. KLAS’ mission is to improve delivery, by independently measuring vendor performance for the benefit of our healthcare provider partners, consultants, investors, and vendors. Working together with executives from over 4500 hospitals and over 2500 clinics, KLAS delivers timely reports, trends, and statistics, which provide a solid overview of vendor performance in the industry. KLAS measures performance of software, professional services, and medical equipment vendors. For more information, go to www.KLASresearch.com, email [email protected], or call 1-800-920-4109 to speak with a KLAS representative. Follow KLAS on Twitter at www.twitter.com/KLASresearch.

About First Databank (FDB)

First Databank (FDB), a subsidiary of Hearst Corporation, provides clinical drug knowledge that helps healthcare professionals make more precise medication-related decisions. With thousands of customers worldwide, FDB enables our information system developer partners to deliver a wide range of valuable, useful and differentiated solutions. As the company that virtually helped to launch the medication decision support category, we offer more than three decades of experience in helping transform drug knowledge into actionable, targeted and effective solutions that improve patient safety and healthcare outcomes. For more information about First Databank, call 800-633-3453 or visit www.firstdatabank.com.

© 2011 First Databank, Inc. A subsidiary of Hearst Corporation. All trademarks mentioned herein are the properties of their respective owners.



CONTACT:

First Databank, Inc.
Denise Apcar, 650-872-4514
[email protected]

KEYWORDS:   United States  North America  California

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