What should Athenahealth users know about Infera?

The Infera clinical decision support application from Inferscience is now available in the Athenahealth Marketplace. It reads structured and unstructured patient data from the EHR, then analyzes the unique details of the patient’s condition against its evidence-based clinical rules, delivering specific care recommendations in real time. Infera is integrated with Athenaclinicals EHR and is certified by the Athenahealth More Disruption Please (MDP) program.

How does it work?

Once a client has signed up for Infera and the application has been activated for the client, the user can launch it by going to the Third party applications button in the encounter. This will initiate a single-sign on process which will lead to the opening of a new browser page which will display the patient demographics and an auto-selected list of care pathways which are most relevant to the patient’s condition. If the user does not intervene, within a few seconds Infera analyzes the patient data and provides actionable recommendations for the auto-selected pathways. If there is inadequate data for certain pathways to make a recommendation, the user is asked to supply the information. The user can also choose to run one or more pathways manually using the EHR data, or interactively by answering a series of questions and get management pointers.

Why is it useful?

Primary care providers should find Infera useful because it will help them to practice evidence based medicine efficiently by applying Infera’s well-researched care pathway to patient data at the point of care. It may help them avoid some specialist referrals by giving them the knowledge and confidence to manage certain conditions themselves. It will certainly save them time compared to reading a long article which may or may not address the management question they have about their patient. Infera will allow them to spend more time with their patients while providing quality, standards based care.

Infera’s care pathways are complex and address a lot of variables leading to a specific and customized care recommendation. The care pathways are built by the Inferscience content team using society guidelines and original articles. The content building process is rigorous, involving several iterations and reviews by editors and specialist reviewers who are board-certified in their specialty. All recommendations come with a bibliography of the sources from which they are built. The pathways cover conditions commonly seen by PCPs in the fields of endocrinology, cardiology, gastroenterology, neurology, preventive medicine, pulmonology and many others