An early look at a CDC project digitizing infectious disease guidelines to work in EHRs

Addressing global infectious diseases has been an ongoing challenge. To tackle the issue, in 2018 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together a Kaizen group consisting of an interdisciplinary collection of healthcare and IT professionals. The group worked collaboratively to develop a roadmap and metrics for the future of clinical guidelines as they apply to electronic health records and infectious diseases. Such an approach has several advantages — and a handful of drawbacks. That’s what attracted the attention of Steph Hoelscher, chief clinical analyst for the Office of Clinical Transformation at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center’s School of Medicine in Lubbock, Texas. Digitalizing these guidelines and algorithms would consist of creating them in a way that an EHR could accept them quickly from an outside source with minimum modification needed to the system.