Advancing Clinical Decision Support

CONCLUDED PROJECT - Content no longer updated

Clinical Decision Support

Clinical decision support (CDS) provides clinicians, staff, patients or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information, intelligently filtered or presented at appropriate times, to enhance health and health care. CDS encompasses computerized alerts and reminders to care providers and patients, clinical guidelines, condition-focused order sets, patient data reports and summaries, documentation templates, diagnostic support, and other tools that enhance decision making in clinical workflow.
- From the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology

"Advancing Clinical Decision Support" is an intensive, multi-part project funded by the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to address the major barriers to achieving widespread use of clinical decision support. The project is being led by the RAND Corporation and Partners Health Care / Harvard Medical School. A particular focus of the project is on aligning CDS and future standards for "meaningful use" of electronic health record (EHR) systems. To accomplish this, the project is pursuing 4 interrelated tasks:

  • Task 1: Distill best practices for CDS design and CDS implementation, preparing resources on best practices for broad dissemination through a variety of online channels.
  • Task 2: Distill best practices and standards for sharing CDS knowledge and produce an open online platform for sharing CDS knowledge artifacts (such as alerts, order sets, etc.) among EHR vendors and/or provider organizations.
  • Task 3: Develop a "clinically important" drug-drug interaction (DDI) list, as well as a legal brief about the liability implications of using the clinically important DDI list.
  • Task 4: Develop a process that engages specialty bodies in weighing performance gaps vs. CDS opportunities to select targets for meaningful use of CDS by specialists.

An Expert Advisory Committee (EAC) is providing the project with high-level advice on our plans, any course adjustments necessary, and on interpretation and dissemination of results.