Emergence of decision support systems in healthcare

Abstract Clinical decision support (CDS) presents knowledge and person-specific information to enhance decision-making, including patient data reports, diagnostic support, and guidelines, in the clinical workflow. The emergence of CDS improves the safety, quality, and effectiveness in health IT. CDS combines knowledge and data to filter, organize, and present clinical data. Healthcare IT integrates CDS applications as components of comprehensive EHR systems, though standalone CDS systems are available. It uses the hidden insights of big data to sift a huge amount of health information to diagnose and provide alerts on dangerous medication interactions. A study by JAMA Internal Medicine found that in 2016, clinical centers received around 76.9 notifications daily, including lab results and pharmacies adding CDS alerts. Today, health IT provides many aids for decision-making, including reminders and alerts to patients, through leveraging an organization’s big data assets. Following the implementation of surveillance, healthcare in countries like Alabama lowered sepsis mortality rates by 53%. Patients learned about their risk-reducing cost-saving of $4300 per capital by testing interactions on drug genes. The other benefits from CDS tools include the calculation of the drug-dosage specific illness severity index, the electronic health record (EHR) input conditions identified and reported, the educational resource materials, etc. An agency says that “CDS implementation and adoption cannot begin until the organization has (its) own clinical goals and priorities.” The objective of this chapter is to bring insight into CDS and its potential benefits despite the integration challenges as well as evaluating patient care quality including patient safety with the use of CDSS and minimizing errors to enhance human support. Today, healthcare professionals face stress in improving the quality of care while low-cost techniques for the adoption of CDS are discussed for their effective deployment.