Physicians' Perceptions of Clinical Decision Support to Treat Patients With Heart Failure in the ED

Clinical decision support (CDS) could help emergency department (ED) physicians treat patients with heart failure (HF) by estimating risk, collating relevant history, and assisting with medication prescribing if physicians' perspectives inform its design and implementation.

To evaluate CDS usability and workflow integration in the hands of ED physician end users who use it in clinical practice.

This mixed-methods qualitative study administered semistructured interviews to ED physicians from 2 community EDs of Kaiser Permanente Northern California in 2023. The interview guide, based on the Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design and the Sociotechnical Environment models, yielded themes used to construct an electronic survey instrument sent to all ED physicians.

Main outcomes were physicians' perceptions of using CDS to complement clinical decision-making, usability, and integration into ED clinical workflow.

Seven key informant physicians (5 [71.4%] female, median [IQR] 15.0 [9.5-15.0] years in practice) were interviewed and survey responses from 51 physicians (23 [45.1%] female, median [IQR] 14.0 [9.5-17.0] years in practice) were received from EDs piloting the CDS intervention. Response rate was 67.1% (51 of 76). Physicians suggested changes to CDS accessibility, functionality, and workflow integration. Most agreed that CDS would improve patient care and fewer than half of physicians expressed hesitation about their capacity to consistently comply with its recommendations, citing workload concerns. Physicians preferred a passive prompt that encouraged, but did not mandate, interaction with the CDS.

In this qualitative study of physicians who were using a novel CDS intervention to assist with ED management of patients with acute HF, several opportunities were identified to improve usability as well as several key barriers and facilitators to CDS implementation.