Vaishnavi Kannan, MS, Mujeeb Basit, MD, MMSc, Duwayne Willett, MD, MS
Designing effective Clinical Decision Support (CDS) tools for use with an Electronic Health Record (EHR) can prove challenging, due to complex real-world scenarios and newly-discovered requirements. As such, deploying new CDS EHR tools shares much in common with new product development, where “agile” principles and practices consistently prove more effective than traditional project management. Typical agile principles and practices can thus prove helpful on CDS projects, including time-boxed “sprints” and lightweight requirements gathering with User Stories and acceptance criteria. Modeling CDS behavior removes ambiguity and promotes shared understanding of desired behavior, but risks analysis paralysis: an Agile Modeling approach can foster effective rapid-cycle CDS design and optimization. The agile practice of automated testing for test-driven design and regression testing can be applied to CDS development in EHRs using open-source tools. Ongoing monitoring of CDS behavior once released to production can identify anomalies and prompt rapid-cycle redesign to further enhance CDS effectiveness. The workshop participant will learn about these topics in an interactive session.