The Datamonitor report echoes Bria’s concerns. For example, Chang said that while CPOE with CDS is now already widely accepted, it is rarely used appropriately. Physicians complain that too many inappropriate alerts pop up on the computer screen, and as a result, providers begin to ignore the alerts,  negating the reason why they were set up in the first place.

Chang also cited a general lack of technology adoption and steep financial investment as high barriers to adoption.

“If Facebook is able to predict who an individual might be friends with based on who he/she is already friends with, why shouldn’t CDS be able to determine what diagnosis patients may have based on their health information?” she asked.

The Datamonitor report suggests that as more facilities adopt EHRs, the amount of clinical data available for research – and translation into CDS technology – will grow exponentially, but healthcare practitioners must have the tools necessary to analyze it.

Chang thinks one effective step healthcare could take would be to apply business intelligence tools to clinical as well as to financial data, allowing organizations to measure outcomes and find the most cost effective procedures.

Violet Shaffer, vice president and global agenda manager at Gartner Research, predicts the most “advanced clusters” of the healthcare industry will use clinical and business intelligence to improve care over the next decade. Indeed, she says clinical and business intelligence should be the “number one priority” for healthcare CIOs.

“Leveraging clinical data to benchmark and do predictive modeling is really hard,” Shaffer said at the 2008 Computer-Physician Connection Symposium. “But to do it well, and to achieve care process agility, you have to transform the enterprise and medicine generally.”

Datamonitor’s report notes that while the technology holds much promise, without interoperability the capabilities of CDS will be limited. Chang said the biggest barrier to interoperability is convincing all stakeholders to participate.

“CDS, it is important to note, will not replace the clinician,” she affirmed. “The technology should allow clinicians to focus their energies on their patients and to provide better care rather than trying to retain information. With patient lives at stake, technology vendors need to do more than pay lip service to the topic of interoperability.”