DHR is celebrating 20 years of investing in digital healthcare research that impacts the quality, safety, and equity of healthcare. In addition to funding the next generation of pioneers and trailblazers, DHR and its team of experts lead collaborative projects and initiatives aimed at identifying and addressing key challenges, gaps, and barriers in the field.
The following section showcases a portion of the impact and reach of a wide range of developed and disseminated resources to address gaps and barriers in the field, so the latest information and evidence can be more easily understood and used.
Impact
AHRQ Advances Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support
DHR has a storied legacy in the field of clinical decision support (CDS). As part of AHRQ’s PCOR CDS Initiative, the Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative (CDSiC) advances the field of patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS). PC CDS comprises digital tools that leverage PC outcomes research findings and patient-specific information to help clinicians and patients make the best decisions given an individual’s circumstances and preferences.
Over the last two years, the CDSiC Stakeholder Community and Outreach Center has convened a diverse community of over 40 experts, grouped into 4 workgroup focus areas, which supported the creation of 12 essential PC CDS resources, all publicly available to download. These resources offer valuable insights that can help researchers, developers, patients, clinicians, and other members of the CDS community.
Investment in CDS Connect
AHRQ’s Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Connect provides a public platform for authoring and sharing interoperable CDS resources so that developers, informaticists, and healthcare system leaders can learn from each other and leverage each other’s experiences, thus reducing duplicative effort and the burden to develop CDS independently. To build on the momentum of the platform, AHRQ launched a challenge competition to seek public input and discover new ideas in designing the platform’s future state. To gather additional information, AHRQ issued a Request for Information to solicit potential collaborators for a new CDS Connect sustainment model. DHR is excited to explore new and innovative pathways to bring the latest evidence to providers and patients that is actionable and personalized.
A Framework and Guide to Support Digital Healthcare Equity
To ensure the use of digital healthcare technologies benefit all patient groups, creators and users must be intentional about equity. To address this, DHR together with Johns Hopkins University and the National Committee for Quality Assurance, developed evidence- and consensus-based resources to help organizations intentionally consider equity in the development and use of digital healthcare technologies and solutions.
The Practical Implementation Guide provides digital healthcare developers and vendors, healthcare systems, clinical providers, and payers an interactive checklist of steps and real world examples for how to advance equity across all phases of the digital healthcare lifecycle.
Reach
The dissemination of DHR-funded research findings is critical to the transfer of successful digital healthcare knowledge, tools, and strategies that improve healthcare delivery, optimize clinician decision making, and engage patients and caregivers.
Throughout the year, DHR-funded researchers and staff showcase their research findings in peer-reviewed journals, at health- and informatics-focused conferences, and during AHRQ national webinars. These dissemination activities highlight the importance of DHR program funding in advancing digital healthcare and improving the health of the American people.
AHRQ-Funded Researchers Disseminate Findings in High-Impact Journals
In 2023, DHR-funded researchers published over 100 research articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. To find publications of interest, search the AHRQ DHR Publications Database.
Reaching the Research Community Through National Webinars
The DHR Program hosts several national webinars throughout the year, inviting digital healthcare experts to discuss their impactful research in the evolving digital healthcare ecosystem. Below are the webinars held in 2023, with topics focused on engaging and empowering patients.
- Leveraging Digital Health Technologies to Address the Needs of Underserved Populations
- Transforming Guidelines into Action: Clinical Decision Support at the Point of Care
- Digital Healthcare Innovations to Engage and Empower Patients in Their Care
Disseminating Knowledge and Research Findings at Conferences
DHR-funded researchers and staff presented research findings at a variety of digital healthcare, health services research, medical, and other conferences. These included the Annual Symposium for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), AcademyHealth’s Annual Research Meeting, the International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care, and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s Global Conference and Exhibition.
At the 2023 AMIA Annual Symposium alone, AHRQ-funded research was highlighted in 28 sessions, demonstrations, and posters.
- Accessibility in Healthcare for Improved Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Co-Design of Person-Centered Informatics Solutions
- The State and Future of Digital Mental Health Solutions: A Collaborative Workshop
- Mitigating AI Risk Through Ethical Data Science
- Data Modernization Initiative in Public Health: Efforts to Strengthen the Public Health Information Infrastructure and the Informatics Workforce
- Will AI Make Terminology Irrelevant?
- A Computational Framework to Evaluate Emergency Department Clinician Task Switching in the Electronic Health Record Using Event Logs
- Integrating Patient Preferences in Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support: Where Are We Now and Where Do We Go Next?
- Prediction of Need for Social Services in an Emergency Department Setting
- A Dashboard for Shared Decision-Making: Putting Patient-Generated Health Data and Clinical Decision Support Together
- Developing a Data Lakes Governance Model at a State Public Health Agency
- Extending the Use of Time Series Clustering to Detect Emergency Department Shifts from Electronic Health Record Audit Logs to Physicians
- Leveraging EHR-Integrated Tools to Improve Diagnostic Safety in Hospitalized Patients: Early Experience & Preliminary Results
- Designing an Artificial Intelligence–Based Intervention in Breast Screening to Enable Same-Day Diagnostic Exams
- Between-Visits Symptom Monitoring in Primary Care: A Mixed-Methods Assessment of a Clinically Integrated Intervention for Asthma
- The SIMPLE Architectural Pattern for Integrating Patient-Facing Apps into Clinical Workflows: Desiderata and Application for Lung Cancer Screening
- Variability in Nursing Documentation Patterns Across Patients’ Hospital Stays
- Development and Usability Testing of an Exercise-Based Primary Care Fall Prevention Clinical Decision Support Tool
- Townhall on Informatics Priorities for Government Agencies
- A Care Transitions Application to Improve Health Outcomes for Hospitalized Patients with Multiple Chronic Conditions: Defining End- User Needs
- Can We Use the EHR to Predict Post-Discharge Adverse Events?
- Challenges and Opportunities Identified from Workflow Execution Models for Advancing Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support
- Shared Decision Aid Navigator System (SEDANS): Health Care Provider User-Centered Design Exploratory Phase
- Theories Integration to Understand Nursing Documentation Prioritization
- Using A Stakeholder Driven-Process to Advance Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support: Visual Framework for Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative (CDSiC) Efforts
- Making EHRs SAFER: Evidence-based Informatics Solutions for Supporting Clinician Cognition
- Clinical Decision Support Resources Should be Freely and Publicly Available to All
- MedMorph Implementation Guidance: Navigating the Standards Stack
- Implications of Digital Advances on Clinical Guideline Trustworthiness and Dissemination Through a Reimagined National Repository
AHRQ-Funded Research Results Noted as Most Relevant, Interesting, or Innovative of the Year
On an annual basis, AMIA identifies the year’s most noteworthy publications and showcases them at the AMIA Annual Symposium. This Biomedical and Health Informatics Year in Review is informed by AMIA’s 24 Working Groups. These groups identified papers representing the most influential biomedical and health informatics work published over the past year. Of the 111 papers selected, 3 of the papers presented the results of DHR research, one from each of the following Workgroups: the Public Health Informatics and Surveillance Workgroup, the Clinical Information Systems Workgroup, and the Primary Care Workgroup.
- Development and Implementation of an Interoperability Tool Across State Public Health Agency’s Disease Surveillance and Immunization Information Systems from Dr. Sripriya Rajamani.
- Lessons Learned from a National Initiative Promoting Publicly Available Standards-Based Clinical Decision Support from Dr. Prashila Dullabh and AHRQ team members James Swiger, Edwin Lomotan, and Chris Dymek.
- Accuracy of Electronic Health Record Food Insecurity, Housing Instability, and Financial Strain Screening in Adult Primary Care from Dr. Joshua Vest.
