Applicability of Clinical Decision Support in Management among Patients Undergoing Cardiac Surgery in Intensive Care Unit: A Systematic Review

Advances achieved in recent decades regarding cardiac surgery have revealed a new risk that goes beyond surgeons’ dexterity; post-operative hours are crucial in these patients and are usually spent at intensive care units (ICUs), where they need to be continuously monitored to adjust the treatments. Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) have been developed to take this real-time information and provide clinical suggestions to physicians, so as to reduce medical errors and increase patient recovery ratio. In this review, an initial total of 666 papers were considered, finishing with 23 of them after the researchers’ filter, which included the deletion of duplications and exclusion if the title and abstract were not of real interest. The review of these papers concludes the applicability and extends the CDSS offer to both doctors and patients. Better prognosis and recovery rate are achieved by using this technology, which also has high acceptance among most physicians. However, despite the evidence that well-designed CDSS are effective, they still need to be refined to offer the best assistance as possible, which may still take time, despite the promising models that have already been applied in real ICUs.