Improved Appropriateness of Advanced Diagnostic Imaging After Implementation of Clinical Decision Support Mechanism

The Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA) mandates clinical decision support mechanism (CDSM) consultation for all advanced imaging. There are a growing number of studies examining the association of CDSM use with imaging appropriateness, but a paucity of multicenter data. This observational study evaluates the association between changes in advanced imaging appropriateness scores with increasing provider exposure to CDSM. Each provider’s first 200 consecutive anonymized requisitions for advanced imaging (CT, MRI, ultrasound, nuclear medicine) using a single CDSM (CareSelect, Change Healthcare) between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2019 were collected from 288 US institutions. Changes in imaging requisition proportions among four appropriateness categories (“usually appropriate” [green], “may be appropriate” [yellow], “usually not appropriate” [red], and unmapped [gray]) were evaluated in relation to the chronological order of the requisition for each provider and total provider exposure to CDSM using logistic regression fits and Wald tests. The number of providers and requisitions included was 244,158 and 7,345,437, respectively. For 10,123 providers with ≥ 200 requisitions (2,024,600 total requisitions), the fraction of green, yellow, and red requisitions among the last 10 requisitions changed by +3.0% (95% confidence interval +2.6% to +3.4%), −0.8% (95% CI −0.5% to −1.1%), and −3.0% (95% CI 3.3% to −2.7%) in comparison with the first 10, respectively. Providers with > 190 requisitions had 8.5% (95% CI 6.3% to 10.7%) more green requisitions, 2.3% (0.7% to 3.9%) fewer yellow requisitions, and 0.5% (95% CI −1.0% to 2.0%) fewer red (not statistically significant) requisitions relative to providers with ≤ 10 requisitions. Increasing provider exposure to CDSM is associated with improved appropriateness scores for advanced imaging requisitions.