Cerner and Duke Clinical Research Institute have teamed up to develop a new CVD risk calculator app, the companies announced late this summer—a move they hope will improve shared decision-making between physicians and their patients.
The app was designed to help healthcare providers estimate 10-year and lifetime atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk, according to a release. Calculations are based on input data like age, race, sex, blood pressure, smoking status and cholesterol levels.
“Guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association now emphasize using the 10-year calculator to identify adults for statin therapy,” Pierre Elias, a cardiology fellow at Columbia University and former student of the Duke University School of Medicine, said in the release. “We wanted an app that would make it easier for clinicians to calculate risk at the point of care. I can’t tell you the number of times this can get missed when there are so many other problems to manage.”
The software was formed using the Cerner Open Developer Experience, an open-source code the researchers used to create an app that could be embedded within Cerner’s existing electronic health record. That way, Elias said, EHRs can pull the necessary data themselves, saving clinicians time.
Another co-developer, Ann Marie Navar, said in the release the app will be useful for stratifying patient data and taking a look at the bigger reality of a person’s health and risk of CVD or stroke.
“We developed the app to be able to pull important patient health data across multiple EHR suppliers at different venues of care in order to get a full picture of how to improve that patient’s health,” said Navar, an assistant professor of cardiology at Duke. “Cerner’s open platform encourages collaboration, which will help advance the way care is delivered regardless of the specific platform people are using.”
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.