First Databank Releases Major Innovation to Address Medication Alert Fatigue in HIT Systems
South San Francisco—First Databank (FDB), a leading provider of clinical drug knowledge that improves medication-related decisions and patient outcomes, announced its new alert management solution, FDB AlertSpace™, designed to address alert fatigue in computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems, has achieved unprecedented industry acceptance among various US hospital institutions.
Studies have shown that clinicians override the majority of medication alerts in CPOE applications, suggesting that current alert configurations may inadequately protect patient safety. FDB developed AlertSpace in order to help its thousands of customers address this common industry-wide problem with the goal to accelerate clinician acceptance and utilization of CPOE applications. At present, hospitals are aggressively deploying CPOE applications as a requirement of the HITECH Act which provides incentive payments to encourage widespread adoption and use of health information technology to improve patient care.
AlertSpace is a Web-based software solution with an intuitive user interface. Users can fine-tune FDB medication alerts and customize them to their organization’s circumstances and clinician perspectives as they see fit. This approach to alert management facilitates collaboration among all clinical stakeholders at an institution and enables the deployment of alert best practices across disparate institutions. Furthermore, the solution will “crowd source” alert knowledge and enable creation of alert “playlists” so that institutions can share the most commonly-customized and clinically effective alerts.
The approach at the core of AlertSpace—the ability to customize and localize alerts, and monitor that customization with triggers from FDB content updates—is one aspect of a multi-pronged strategic imperative for addressing alert fatigue underway at FDB. A key goal of this imperative is to make FDB content more clinically intuitive for all drug knowledge users.
The first hospital sites to go live with AlertSpace are Citizens Memorial and Berkshire Health System, with Texas Health Resources, HCA and a number of others in progress.
According to Denni McColm, Chief Information Officer at Citizens Memorial Healthcare: “We’ve been live with CPOE for over seven years, and have achieved Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model, but we are always working to advance our use of technology to enhance the care we deliver. AlertSpace contributed to physician satisfaction by giving our clinical team more control over alerts and a method for addressing alert fatigue. A side benefit we didn’t anticipate turned out to be the collaborative atmosphere that the initiative fostered between the physicians and pharmacists.”
“The goal in developing AlertSpace is to provide our customers with a useful solution to enable the customization of FDB drug knowledge in a way that is truly meaningful to them,” said Greg Dorn, MD, president and CEO, FDB. “The best CPOE system cannot replace the wisdom and knowledge of clinician experts. We are giving flexibility to fine-tune the data within clinician’s workflow and increasing the effectiveness of clinical systems such that they are rapidly adopted. AlertSpace is transforming alert management at these hospitals.”
About First Databank (FDB)
First Databank (FDB) provides drug knowledge that helps healthcare professionals make 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 launched the medication decision support category, we offer more than three decades of experience in transforming drug knowledge into actionable, targeted, and effective solutions that improve patient safety and healthcare outcomes. For a complete look at our solutions and services visit www.fdbhealth.com.