Readers Write: Navigating the Future of Clinical Information Post-Public Health Emergency

Navigating the Future of Clinical Information Post-Public Health Emergency
By Greg Samios

Greg Samios, MBA is president and CEO of the clinical effectiveness business of Wolters Kluwer Health.

The global health community has acknowledged the official end of the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE). The impact of the PHE had both positives (telehealth) and negatives. Of the latter, there are many, but the rampant flow of inaccurate and misleading information, also known as the infodemic, is a key one because of its direct impact on patients.

This infodemic highlighted the important role clinical decision support (CDS) tools play in distributing a high volume of reliable, trustworthy, and ever-evolving information to clinicians around the world. As the global health community looks to the future, there are a few lessons from COVID-19 to consider about the power of CDS.

The PHE may have ended, but what about the Infodemic?

The end of the PHE offers a moment of reflection about where the industry goes next to ensure that CDS continues to support clinicians through distributing reliable, transparent, and consistent information across care teams. It also opens the possibility for a period of uncertainty and unpredictable increases in the variability of care.

Looking ahead – as healthcare leaders consider both ongoing threats of COVID-19 as well as the inevitable next pandemic – CDS resources could be leveraged to improve speed and transparency and more effectively reach public health goals during an infodemic. The industry needs to focus on how it can be agile in distributing continually emerging and changing information in the next PHE.

But there is another challenge looming to further deepen the entrenchment of the infodemic: the arrival of generative AI, including ChatGPT. While generative AI offers potential for healthcare, it may also present risks if not developed and applied responsibly. This could be particularly critical around its use in clinical care.

CDS everywhere, including virtual

The PHE helped deliver new avenues for patients to interact with healthcare providers, such as virtual visits. It also proved and elevated the important role that local retail pharmacists play as an extension of a patient’s care team – providing COVID tests, vaccines, treatment, and counsel to patients, among other key responsibilities. The challenge for the future will be to ensure that no matter where patients interact with their care team, they receive the most optimal and consistent care as possible.

In tandem with these shifts, it’s crucial that healthcare systems work together and provide smart, consistent, and accurate information. CDS resources offer a standard approach to align the thousands of micro-decisions clinicians make every day, from physicians in the emergency room to primary care doctors at urgent care to virtual care at home and pharmacists at the neighborhood pharmacy.

Closing the care variability gap

There is still a great deal of care variability, depending on which clinician a patient visits, where the patient lives, how much insurance and social support a patient has, and numerous other factors. Regardless of circumstances, clinicians should still have access to the most recent data and treatment recommendations. COVID-19 demonstrated that when information is widely shared, CDS resources can swiftly close the gap whether clinicians are eight or 8,000 miles apart.

More data, more insight

CDS is standard for clinicians to search data to diagnose patients. But the power of those searches can also create new data that can provide a broader set of insights. By analyzing clinician search queries, CDS enables providers to see around corners and proactively observe trends and understand usage patterns, such as which clinical questions are most important.

CDS resources can also share new medical updates with millions of providers and push notifications within the workflow of electronic medical record (EMR) systems to quickly educate clinicians with treatment recommendations that are trustworthy, verified, and improve patient outcomes, which can be incredibly valuable during a public health emergency.

Ultimately, it’s to everyone’s benefit to create an ecosystem where clinical knowledge systems and EMR vendors can work harmoniously to capture and inform point-of-care decisions.

During the PHE, global healthcare leaders learned how to adapt and make changes to everyday healthcare operations to improve patient outcomes. To make progress as an industry towards closing the care variability gap, and to ensure we are prepared for the next PHE, health organizations should seek a CDS partner that can provide both access to trustworthy and timely information, continuity to support patients no matter where they seek care, and provide insights to benefit the entire healthcare system.