Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) are electronic systems designed to aid clinical decision making, in which the individual characteristics of patients are used to generate recommendations that are presented to clinicians for consideration.
One of the keys to improving clinical practice is the implementation of clinical decision-making support systems (SADC) that integrate and interoperate with Electronic Medical Record. The SADC (or CDSS) has the ultimate goal of supporting health professionals in decision making and helps improve the interaction between scientific evidence and patient information. The data is presented in an organized way for the medical and nursing staff at the appropriate times. This improves the quality of care, patient safety and the efficiency of hospital processes.
Despite the many benefits, the challenge of health systems is not to have these tools to support decision-making (something that many already have) but to be adopted and used for practice clinic today.
Clinical Decision Support Applications
Information
SADC provides the doctor, patient or any individual with specific and intelligently processed information at the right time to support or improve the clinical decision-making process and thus ensure better patient care and care process. Therefore, a good SADC offers evidence-based and context-relevant information that serves to guide the action of health professionals and, more importantly, that is integrated into their workflow.
This won’t make sense if the information is not available at the time it is needed. The accessibility and availability of information are essential to ensure reliability in the decision-making process. In addition to increasing patient safety.
People
Once we have the right information, it is provided to the right people at the time they need it. Support systems for health decision making present the information to people who can take action on it. In this context, the appropriate people can be doctors, nurses or the patient himself.
Data
The presentation of the data set is important. This affects many aspects of the care process, among others, patient safety. There are several ways to present the information (dashboards, alerts, patient lists, etc.). Therefore, the best way to present the data is determined for it to be useful and actionable, as well as adapted to each profile.
Channel
The SADC can display the information through different channels such as the Electronic Medical Records, the Patient Portal, or a mobile application for health professionals Depending on the recipient of the information, the platform through which the message is delivered is either one or the other.
Conclusion
The wide penetration of the CDSSs requires a continuous feedback between the healthcare team and the team responsible for its maintenance, a permanent active search on what information to provide, at what time and to what person, designing preferably selective CDSSs (for specialties or professional groups) to avoid saturating the system and achieve the desired effect, as well as a critical evaluation of the unintended consequences of the implementation of the CDSSs, such as unexpected errors and / or alert fatigue, Making use of Artificial Intelligence to make sense of complex data in Electronic Medical Records save time and improves the revenue cycle.
