Mayo Clinic and National Decision Support Company announced on Tuesday a new offering that enables physicians to access clinical guidance about laboratory tests at the point of care.

The new offering comes as hospitals, EHR vendors, the federal government and others in the healthcare industry are looking to incorporate more actionable clinical decisions support capabilities into electronic health records.

Earlier this month, for instance, the Clinical Decision Support Coalition posted voluntary guideline for designing such decision making tools in response to provisions in the 21st Century Cures Act that moves some CDS products outside the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory scope.

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The new CareSelect Lab software, for its part, is a clinical decision support tool that the organizations said aggregates Mayo’s medical knowledge about health conditions and is integrated into electronic health record platforms to essentially deliver best practices through NDSC’s CareSelect platform.

NDSC CEO Michael Mardini said the combination means that customers can access more 1,500 care models that Mayo maintains.

Physicians can tap into CareSelect Lab for guidance on laboratory, pathology and genetic testing, as well as interact directly with the guidelines from their EHR workflow to access information about appropriate tests to order.

And at the enterprise level, hospitals using CareSelect and CareSelect Lab can also view analytics benchmark to compare doctors ordering patterns, better understand overall test trends and pinpoint gaps in care, Mayo and NDSC said.

Mayo’s Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology chair William Morice, MD, said the tools can help physicians reduce common mistakes, whether those doctors are on staff at Mayo or access its lab tests.

“We must extend to them the same decision guidance that we avail to our own physicians and scientists,” Morice said. “And we must do so in a way that integrates with their current workflows and systems.”

Although Mayo did not state how much CareSelect Lab or the CareSelect platform cost, it did disclose a financial interest in the product and said it will allocate the revenue it earns from the product for its not-for-profit education, patient care and research work.

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