This Request for Information (RFI) seeks to gather insights into existing and emerging Clinical Decision Support (CDS) tools that are, or could be, deployed within community EMRs to support clinically appropriate prescribing. The intent is to better understand how such solutions could support clinically appropriate prescribing at the point of care, the technical and integration considerations involved, and whether vendors already have established integrations with community EMRs (either in Alberta or comparable jurisdictions) and how this positions such solutions for deployment within Alberta’s current health system environment.
In Alberta, prescribers (physicians, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, registered nurses with prescribing authority, etc.) operate across a heterogeneous digital health landscape. In community settings, numerous electronic medical record (EMR) systems are in use, many of which include embedded clinical decision-support capabilities such as alerts related to potential drug interactions, polypharmacy, duplicate therapies, and dosing considerations. The sophistication and configurability of these tools varies across platforms, and in many cases, alert logic reflects vendor defaults rather than provincially curated, evidence-based rules.
Provincial platforms, including Connect Care and Netcare, also provide comparatively sophisticated functionality to support medication-related decision-making, leveraging broader clinical context and system-level data. Together, these existing capabilities highlight that clinical appropriateness alerting is not entirely absent from the current environment. However, the variability across systems, differences in configuration and prioritization, and the risk of duplicative or low-value alerts create challenges for consistency, usability, and impact.
This landscape presents both challenges and opportunities for embedding clinical appropriateness supports in a way that is interoperable, scalable, and sensitive to prescriber workflows, while complementing (rather than duplicating) existing functionality.
This RFI is not a competitive bid process and will not result in a contract award.
