AHRQ to fund efforts to develop CDS sharing tools

The agency sets $1M in prize money to find ways to make it easier to implement decision support.


The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services, is offering as much as $1 million in prize money for new sharable clinical decision support tools to reduce the burden of implementing these applications from scratch.

“Currently, healthcare systems translate clinical practice guidelines and other evidence-based recommendations into CDS in siloed fashion, leaving opportunities to share lessons learned and to build on collective experience and knowledge unrealized,” the agency explains in a new funding opportunity announcement.

In 2017, the National Academy of Medicine released a report on optimizing strategies for clinical decision support, which included a national CDS repository, the creation of a learning community and the establishment of an investment program. Now, AHRQ wants to address these priorities.

The agency in 2017 laid early groundwork for electronic sharing of clinical decision support resources by launching the repository, called CDS Connect, which is a platform for hosting CDS and making it more sharable, standardized and available. The platform supports research projects in such areas as cholesterol, opioid, pain and diabetes management. It also has a free CDS authoring tool.



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Now, with use of the repository and CDS artifacts already available through CDS Connect, AHRQ wants to improve the sharing of CDS through development of interoperable CDS resources across all electronic health record systems being used across the nation.

“The CDS is aimed toward not just physicians at the point of care but toward other members of the care team, such as nurses, care coordinators, population health managers and community health workers,” according to AHRQ.

Further, additional uses of the repository and CDS artifacts can support:
  • Building additional functionality or new ways to present CDS to users.
  • Implementing and evaluating CDS in new sites and settings.
  • Using application programming interfaces to integrate with other types of health IT.
  • Finding innovative ways to incorporate patient or caregiver preferences in the CDS.

The funding opportunity announcement is available here.

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