This article examines whether a targeted educational intervention will improve clinical-decision-support adoption and effectiveness for providers who consistently override, or do not adopt, CDS.
Clinical decision support (CDS) can prevent medical errors and improve patient outcomes. Electronic health record (EHR)-based CDS, designed to facilitate prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) review, has reduced inappropriate opioid prescribing. However, the pooled effectiveness of CDS has exhibited substantial heterogeneity and current literature does not adequately detail why certain CDS are more successful than others. Clinicians regularly override CDS, limiting its impact. No studies recommend how to help nonadopters recognize and recover from CDS misuse. The authors hypothesized that a targeted educational intervention would improve CDS adoption and effectiveness for nonadopters; and over 10 months, they identified 478 providers consistently overriding CDS (nonadopters) and sent each up to three educational message(s) via email or EHR-based chat. One hundred sixty-one nonadopters stopped consistently overriding CDS and started reviewing the PDMP after contact. The authors concluded that targeted messaging is a low-resource way to disseminate CDS education and improve CDS adoption and best practice delivery. Publisher Abstract Provided