Introduction
Clinical decision support (CDS) systems provide clinicians, staff, patients, and other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information, intelligently filtered and presented at appropriate times, to enhance health and health care.
The Institute of Medicine has long recognized problems with health care quality in the United States, and for more than a decade has advocated using health information technology (IT), including electronic CDS, to improve quality. Since 2004, when the Federal Government promoted the importance of electronic medical records (EMRs),there has been a slow but increasing adoption of health IT. It must be remembered, though, that these health IT applications are a means to improve health care quality, not an end in them selves. Further, although EMRs with computerized provider order entry (CPOE) can improve accessibility and legibility of information, it is unlikely that there will be major improvements in the quality and cost of care from the use of health IT without proper implementation and use of CDS.
To illustrate this point, imagine the following scenario: While his doctor is out-of-town, an elderly asthma patient who has developed severe knee pain sees another physician in his doctor’s office. An EMR provided documentation of the last visit, including recent laboratory results and a list of the patient’s medications. This information easily brought the doctor up to date on the patient’s condition. The doctor entered an order for medicine for the knee pain into the system, printed out a (legible) prescription for the patient, and sent him on his way. Unfortunately, with in 2 months, the patient wound up in the emergency room with a bleeding ulcer caused by interaction of the pain medicine with the patient’s asthma medicine.
Problems of this kind occur frequently, as documented in reports from the Institute of Medicine. Any of several types of CDS tools could have prevented this patient’s drug interaction. Examples include a pop-up alert to the potential drug interaction when the doctor prescribed the new medicine clinical prediction rules to assess the risks of the pain medication for this patient clinical guidelines for treatment of asthma; or reminders for timely followup. This scenario illustrates that EMRs are the foundation for patient safety and health care quality improvement, but CDS is an essential element in fully realizing these goals.
This review presents a summary of the state of the art of electronic CDS for clinicians. It includes background information on the types of CDS and focuses on the outcomes of deploying these CDS interventions. It also discusses the major issues and challenges of CDS implementation and evaluation. After reviewing what is known about implementing CDS, the impact from its use, and the knowledge gaps that remain, the review examines factors that can facilitate broader use of CDS, including the role of various stakeholders in influencing CDS adoption. This review uses both the peer-reviewed literature on implementation and outcomes of CDS and a variety of books, white papers, and recommendations put forth by national organizations in recent years.