Clinical decision support for high-cost imaging: A randomized clinical trial

PLoS One. 2019 Mar 15;14(3):e0213373. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213373. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

There is widespread concern over the health risks and healthcare costs from potentially inappropriate high-cost imaging. As a result, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will soon require high-cost imaging orders to be accompanied by Clinical Decision Support (CDS): software that provides appropriateness information at the time orders are placed via a best practice alert for targeted (i.e. likely inappropriate) imaging orders, although the impacts of CDS in this context are unclear. In this randomized trial of 3,511 healthcare providers at Aurora Health Care, we study the impacts of CDS on the ordering behavior of providers. We find that CDS reduced targeted imaging orders by a statistically significant 6%, however there was no statistically significant change in the total number of high-cost scans or of low-cost scans. The results suggest that the impending CMS mandate requiring healthcare systems to adopt CDS may modestly increase the appropriateness of high-cost imaging.

Publication types

  • Randomized Controlled Trial
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Benchmarking
  • Decision Support Systems, Clinical*
  • Diagnostic Imaging / economics*
  • Diagnostic Imaging / statistics & numerical data
  • Female
  • Health Care Costs / statistics & numerical data
  • Health Personnel
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Medicaid / economics
  • Medical Order Entry Systems
  • Medicare / economics
  • Prospective Studies
  • Software
  • United States
  • Wisconsin

Grants and funding

The study was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation under the grant title of "Physician-Level Randomized Evaluations of Outpatient Radiology Decision Support", https://www.arnoldfoundation.org/. The funders provided feedback on the research proposal but played no role in the data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or the preparation of the manuscript.