Mayo Clinic and NDSC Unveil CareSelect Lab™, Providing Real-Time Medical Guidance When Ordering Lab Tests

By Gina Chiri-Osmond • September 19, 2017

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The CareSelect Lab tool assists health care providers with appropriate ordering of laboratory testing, improving patient care and reducing wasteful spending.

Health care providers now have an online tool that can improve patient care and reduce unnecessary health care costs through appropriate ordering of laboratory testing—real-time guidance while they sit with their patients.

Mayo Clinic has teamed with National Decision Support Company (NDSC) to develop CareSelect Lab^™—a decision-support tool that aggregates clinical knowledge around a comprehensive menu of conditions and translates that knowledge into best-practice recommendations.

“CareSelect Lab is a natural extension of NDSC’s capabilities to deliver EHR-integrated guidelines and brings together the industry standard for EHR-delivered guidance with the more than 1,500 best-practice care models—authored, curated, and maintained by Mayo Clinic,” says Michael Mardini, CEO of NDSC.

CareSelect Lab integrates with a hospital’s electronic health record (EHR) and is delivered via NDSC’s CareSelect^™ Platform—the same platform that drives NDSC’s industry-standard CareSelect Imaging^™ decision-support product. Already, CareSelect has been adopted by more than 250 health systems across the U.S. today, informing practitioner imaging decisions 3 million times per month.

CareSelect Lab provides real-time guidance and addresses common areas of laboratory test misutilization at the EHR point-of-order entry, including:

• Extensive clinical guidance on all laboratory, pathology, and genetic testing that can be ordered (sourced from Mayo’s clinical library of evidence-based guidelines, and curated and delivered through NDSC’s CareSelect Platform).
• Direct interaction with the test guidelines in a health care provider’s normal EHR workflow, receiving feedback as to the most appropriate test(s) to order.
• Benchmarking and analytics tools that enable organizations to compare health care provider ordering patterns, identify gaps in care and manage overall test utilization.

“It is commonly recognized that laboratory tests are frequently misordered, with a risk of profound negative impact on both care and cost,” says William Morice, II, M.D., Ph.D., Chair of Mayo Clinic’s Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology. “Health care providers around the world who rely on Mayo Clinic for testing need more than just access to our broad menu of tests. We must extend to them the same decision guidance that we avail to our own physicians and scientists—and we must do so in a way that integrates with their current workflows and systems.”

“Mayo Clinic and NDSC are developing better ways to improve health care for providers and their patients,” says Curt Hanson, M.D., Chief Medical Officer of Mayo Medical Laboratories. “We have all this knowledge at our fingertips—IT capabilities, clinical and laboratory expertise, laboratory test analytics, health care data, etc. Why not put that knowledge at the ordering physician’s fingertips?”

Mayo Clinic has a financial interest in the product referenced in this article. Mayo will use any revenue it receives to support its not-for-profit mission in patient care, education and research.

Gina Chiri-Osmond

Gina Chiri-Osmond is a Marketing Channel Manager at Mayo Clinic Laboratories.