Question

Discuss the most significant missions of clinical decision support (CDS) today. Evaluate if the current CDS systems have fully lived up to their promises. Analyze what can be improved.

Answer 1

Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is considered as an important tool in the healthcare sector. The main objective of this tool is to handle large amount of data so that the next step for the treatments of the patient can be suggested. This tool also aims at reduction in any kind of duplicate testing and also ensures that the data of all the patients are safe. Organisations operating in this sector implement this tool in order to reduce complexity in the operation.

Challenges

If the performance of CDS is looked at it can be seen that they are getting integrated with Electronic Health Record (EHR) so that data which are already existing can be used for several purposes but several organisation operating in the health care industry are facing difficulties and challenges. This tool is not user-friendly and challenges in pathways of decision making are faced.

Furthermore, if a CDS is not properly implemented by an organisation, then the user gets frustrated with clinical burnout as well as alert fatigue. Pop-outs and notifications are the major reason for frustration.

How can it be improved

The objective of CDS is useful for organisations operating in the health care sector. So, the system should be made user-friendly and it should help the management team of the organisation to make relevant decisions. The secondary aim of this tool should focus on making the activities within the organisation a simple one.