Challenges and Solutions in Optimizing Execution Performance of a Clinical Decision Support-Based Quality Measurement...

Given the close relationship between clinical decision support (CDS) and quality measurement (QM), it has been proposed that a standards-based CDS Web service could be leveraged to enable QM. Benefits of such a CDS-QM framework include semantic consistency and implementation efficiency. However, earlier research has identified execution performance as a critical barrier when CDS-QM is applied to large populations. Here, we describe challenges encountered and solutions devised to optimize CDS-QM execution performance. Through these optimizations, the CDS-QM execution time was optimized approximately three orders of magnitude, such that approximately 370,000 patient records can now be evaluated for 22 quality measure groups in less than 5 hours (approximately 2 milliseconds per measure group per patient). Several key optimization methods were identified, with the most impact achieved through population-based retrieval of relevant data, multi-step data staging, and parallel processing. These optimizations have enabled CDS-QM to be operationally deployed at an enterprise level.