This is the reading note for HlthInfo730 Week1 reading, Effect of Clinical Decision-Support Systems: A Systematic Review.

Motivation

To find evidence of the effects of Clinical Decision-Support Systems(CDSS), to support widespread use of it.

Defining CDSS

A CDSS is “any electronic system designed to aid directly in clinical decision making, in which characteristics of individual patients are used to generate patient-specific assessments or recommendations that are then presented to clinicians for consideration”

Classic CDSSs

  • Classic CDSSs have
    • alerts,
    • reminders,
    • order sets,
    • drug-dose calculations,

to automatically remind the clinician of a specific action, or care summary dashboards that provide performance feedback on quality indicators.

  • Information retrieval tools, such as an “infobutton” embedded in a clinical information system, are designed to aid clinicians in the search and retrieval of context-specific knowledge from information sources based on patient-specific information from a clinical information system.
  • Knowledge resources, such as UpToDate, Epocrates, and MD Consult, consist of distilled primary literature that allows selection of content germane to a specific patient to facilitate decision making at the point of care or for a specific care situation.

Assessing Outcomes of CDSS

The research looks for the following types of CDSS’s outcomes:

  • Clinical Outcomes
    • length of stay,
    • morbidity (CDSSs improved morbidity outcomes),
    • mortality (CDSSs have low impact),
    • health-related quality of life,
    • adverse events (low impact)
  • Health care process
    • Recommended Preventive Care Service Ordered or Completed (significant impact)
    • clinical study,
    • treatment ordered or completed
  • User workload and efficiency (user knowledge, number of patients seen, clinician workload, and efficiency),
  • Relationship-centered (patient satisfaction),
  • Economic (cost and cost-effectiveness),
  • Use and implementation by a health care provider (acceptance, satisfaction, use, and implementation).