Definition, Scope, and Challenges

The introduction of clinical decision support (CDS) into a health care environment takes into consideration the kinds of CDS, technical aspects involved in providing them, and the approaches needed to make the deployment successful. It is important to determine technical feasibility, relative importance or priority, practical ease of implementation, and prospects for success, for various types of CDS. This chapter addresses the issue of achieving broad impact of CDS on patient safety, health care quality, and health care cost-effectiveness. The appreciation of the whole landscape of CDS is useful to strategic planners seeking to develop consensus and infrastructure on a national scale, managers and implementers of CDS in medical centers and practices, knowledge content providers in identifying potential opportunities for providing their content and services, and clinical information system vendors in terms of the ways in which they can facilitate the development of the needed interfaces and application capabilities. Investment and effort for creating knowledge management infrastructure for delivering CDS are essential.