Efficacy of a Clinical Decision Support Tool to Promote Guideline-Concordant Evaluations in Patients With High-Risk Microscopic Hematuria: A Cluster Randomized Quality Improvement Project

We aimed to determine whether implementation of clinical decision support (CDS) tool integrated into the electronic health record (EHR) of a multi-site academic medical center increased the proportion of patients with American Urological Association (AUA) "high risk" microscopic hematuria (MH) who receive guideline concordant evaluations. We conducted a two-arm cluster randomized quality improvement project in which 202 ambulatory sites from a large health system were randomized to either have their physicians receive at time of test results an automated CDS alert for patients with 'high-risk' MH with associated recommendations for imaging and cystoscopy (intervention) or usual care (control). Primary outcome was met if a patient underwent both imaging and cystoscopy within 180 days from MH result. Secondary outcomes assessed individual completion of imaging, cystoscopy or placement of imaging orders. There were 917 patients randomized to intervention (n=476) or control (n=441) arms between October-December 2021. The percentage of eligible patients for whom the alert correctly triggered in the intervention arm was 83%. Primary outcome was achieved in 0.6% vs. 0.9% (RR: 0.69; 95% CI 0.15, 3.10) of patients in the intervention and control arms, respectively. Patients in the intervention and control groups had similar rates of completed imaging (17.7% vs. 14.7%) and cystoscopy (1.5% vs. 0.9%). Those in the intervention arm had a higher likelihood of CT urogram order (5.5% vs. 1.1%, p=0.003) and a non-significant increase in urology evaluation (11.1% vs. 7.5%, p=0.09). Implementing an EHR-integrated CDS tool to promote evaluation of patients with high-risk MH did not lead to improvements in patient completion of a full guideline-concordant evaluation. The development of an algorithm to trigger a CDS alert was demonstrated to be feasible and effective. Further multi-level assessment of barriers to evaluation are necessary to continue to improve the approach to evaluating high risk patients with MH.