Loading...
Pneumonia guidelines are underused in the emergency department (ED); however, clinical decision support — embedded into the electronic medical record — could attenuate practice variation and improve care. Using a quality-improvement design, researchers evaluated the performance of an electronic pneumonia clinical decision support tool (ePNa) in ≈7000 adult ED patients (median age, 67). The ePNa assisted in diagnosis, risk stratification, laboratory workup, site of care, and selection of antibiotic therapy. The tool was deployed at 16 U.S. community hospitals within the Intermountain Healthcare system at 2-month intervals in 2017 and 2018.
The ePNa tool was associated with significantly more discharges from the ED directly to home (29% before…