Clinical Surveillance

There is a nice article in the November 2009 issue of Hospital Pharmacy on the use of clinical surveillance in pharmacy. I’ve mentioned these types of systems before here and here.

From the article:

Clinical surveillance tools are atype of clinical decision support system (CDSS), providing pharmacists with patient information that has been filtered according to predefined criteria and is presented at appropriate times to enhance patient care. These tools pull data from 3 sources—admission/discharge/transfer (ADT), laboratory, and pharmacy—and use clinical rules to analyze the data and alert the user of instances that meet the rules’criteria. Though there is some variability in methods across the different vendors’ products, these Webbased applications enerally function by interfacing (HL7) with the hospital’s information systems to securely pull the data to the vendor’s server where the data are analyzed against a set of clinical rules. Some vendors allow the client to build their own rules, some provide a foundational set of rules, and others do not allow user-defined rules. This is an important distinction to make when evaluating the different applications.

For more information try visiting John’s Evernote repository for Clinical Decision Support.