Clinical Decision Rule

The Clinical Decision Rule Reference category is used to set Clinical Decision Rules that can trigger alerts off of criteria that you set. In practice, these will prompt the user to ensure certain actions are taken.

Clinical Decision Rule Alerts are presented when the criteria for a Clinical Decision Rule is met. By default, MacPractice includes Clinical Decision Rules for high and low BMI, Cessation Counseling, Hypertension, Hypotension, and high and low resting heart rates. The default Clinical Decision Rules can not be modified or deleted, but they can be disabled by unchecking the Enabled checkbox.

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Additional Clinical Decision Rules can be added to create Clinical Alerts based on a patient's diagnoses, medications, procedures, age, sex, lab test results, races, ethnicities, languages, height/length, weight, BMI, date of birth, blood pressure, and allergies. In the References ability, select Clinical Decision Rule in the sidebar and click the plus button to create a new record.

The Title is the short description for the alert, and will appear as the alert title in the alert window as well as the alert report. The Description is the long description for the alert used to explain why the alert message appeared when accessing the patient record. Aside from the alert responses, the Title and the Description are the only information that your staff will see when the alert opens, so you should make sure they are clear and understandable.

Below, the Qualifications area allows you to specify what criteria are needed to trigger the alert. Alert Qualifications can be used in numerous ways by using different combinations of criteria. In order for an alert to be triggered, the patient needs to have a match on each alert row. Each alert row can have multiple items associated to it, so the patient only has to match at least one item on each row. If you need to set up an alert that will only be triggered if the patient has both items associated to him or her, you will need to make sure you specify this on two separate rows.