Question

How do you used clinical decision support system in practice. What do you see as some of the benefits and challenges with these type of system?

Answer 1

A clinical decision support system is a health information technology system that is designed to provide physician and health care workers with clinical decision support and assist in decision making tasks.

USES -

• The main purpose of this is to assist clinician at the point of analysis and diagnosis based on patient data.
• The clinician gives input of patient data and the system analyses and gives output and the doctor may act on it.
• The physician may decide on the output whether to act of he may ignore it .
• A varient of CDSS is CASE BASED REASONING SYSTEM (CDR) might use the previous data to determine the appropriate amount of radiotherapy beams in radiation therapy.
• Medical physician and psychiatrist even may revise their output based on the result given by CDSS.
• This can be used in time of pre diagnosis, during diagnosis and post diagnosis.

BENEFITS- It helps to give a better quality of care to patients.

• Reduces the risk of medication errors.
• Reduces misdiagnosis.
• Provide the entire medical team with reliable and efficient information.
• Improve patient efficiency and patient friendliness.
• Access all information in one place.

CHALLENGES-

• CDSS dependent on repositories.
• Knowledge management.
• Misinterpretation of clinical datasets.
• Failure to fit routine work for clinicians.
• Need to create new CDS interventions.
• Improving the human computer interface.
• Need to summarise the full patient details.
• We need to use freetext information to drive clinical decision making.
• Need large databases to create new CDS.
• To build internet accessible clinical decision support repositories.