Clinical Decision Support System (CDS)

Clinical Decision Support is the process of applying health-related decisions and actions with appropriate and systematized clinical knowledge and patient information in order to improve quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare delivery (Campbell, 2013). The system designed to provide physicians and other healthcare professionals with clinical decision support (CDS) in order to assist with clinical decision making is known as Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS). CDS has the ability to significantly impact improvements in quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care (AHRQ, 2016). AHRQ has launched a new initiative to circulate and implement patient centered outcomes research (PCOR) findings through CDS which will promote

According to healthit.gov (2013), CDS is a sophisticated health IT component and requires compatible biomedical knowledge, person-specific data, and a reasoning and inferencing mechanism that combines knowledge and data to generate and prevent helpful information to clinicians as care is being delivered.

CDSS links patient data with an electronic knowledge base in order to improve decision-making and improve the health care they deliver. The knowledge base is a database for storing knowledge in a suitable form depending on its use. The computerized physician order entry (CPOE) is a requirement to set up electronic CDS (Beeler, Bates, & Hug, 2014). CDSS serves to provide clinicians, hospital staffs, patients, or other individuals with person-specific data and information and logically filters at appropriate times thereby improving health and enhancing health care. Some of the benefits of CDS discussed by healthit.gov (2013) include: increased quality of care and enhanced health outcomes, avoidance of errors and adverse events, improved efficiency, cost-benefit, provider and patient satisfaction, etc. Similarly, Beeler, Bates, and Hug (2014) have discussed some applications of CDS such as: improving processes,