Clinical teams build their own assessments.

EVAL Health began with a request that IT departments could not fill. Clinicians needed clinical decision support, patient assessments and calculators built for the way their own practice works. Those tools mattered to the clinic that asked for them, but they never outranked an organization-wide EHR project, so the work stayed on paper: forms scored by hand, scanned into the chart, with no way to see a score change over time and no way to flag the result that needed attention.

Jennifer Glen, DNP, a nurse practitioner, and Tim Michalski, a health IT engineer, had built clinical decision support together before, in hematology and cardiology. This time they started further back, by asking what clinics commonly need from their IT department. Drawing on decades of clinical practice and hours of interviews with clinicians about how their day actually runs, they mapped the instruments clinics were already running on paper: how each one was scored, what the score changed, and where in the visit it had to appear to be worth anything.

There are thousands of clinical instruments published in research journals that clinicians want to use and have no practical way to run. A paper form is difficult to administer and score reliably, and the scoring rules printed in a journal article are not a working tool on their own.

No one else is going to build those instruments. Most health IT effort goes to documentation, getting the visit recorded in the EHR, rather than to the instruments a clinician uses to assess a patient and decide what happens next. Requests for those wait years. There are also not enough health IT developers to build them one at a time, and every tool that gets built has to be maintained for years afterwards. Clinicians are equipped to build these instruments themselves. What they lacked was an intuitive, no-code builder made for the job.

EVAL is that builder. Working alone, a clinician can write the questions, branch them on the answers given, score the result, and set the range that raises an alert. The finished instrument reaches staff and patients within days, not months or years.