Clinical decision support systems have come a long way from their early implementations in the 1970s. As stand-alone systems that were expensive to build and difficult to use — and given the legal and ethical resistance at the time to using computers to practice medicine — CDSSs tended to be restricted to “academic pursuits,” as a Nature article put it.
Decades later, these systems integrate with other clinical applications, run in browsers or on mobile devices, and support clinical teams in a variety of care settings, from the intensive care unit to primary care.
Two trends have pushed the…
How to Use Clinical Decision Support Systems to Improve Patient Outcomes
