Bradley Merrill Thompson, a Member of the Firm in the Health Care and Life Sciences practice, in the Washington, DC, office, was quoted in an article titled "CMS: Don't Over-Rely on EHR Decision Support Alerts."
Following is an excerpt:
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is warning against relying too heavily on clinical decision support (CDS) "pop-up" alerts when meeting meaningful use Stage 2 objectives. With the enormous amounts of patient data being generated from medical devices and electronic health records, CDS is seen as a linchpin for enabling the effective use of all of this information. As medical data and individual patient information become more readily available electronically, CDS is meant to improve quality of care and enhance outcomes by avoiding errors and adverse events, improving efficiencies, reducing costs, while enhancing provider and patient satisfaction.
"This is one of the main drivers for the popularity of CDS. For the next stage of meaningful use, healthcare providers using electronic health records will need to incorporate more and more CDS into their software to qualify for incentive payments," says Bradley Merrill Thompson, general counsel for the CDS Coalition, which represents software providers, healthcare payers, providers and medical device manufacturers.