Clinical Decision Support

Clinical decision support (CDS) is a digital tool that provides timely and person-specific information, intelligently filtered or presented at appropriate times, to enhance patient outcomes and quality of care.

Clinicians use CDS at the point of care, but it can be used in other settings to drive care quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness. This includes patient-centered CDS, which helps to boost patient engagement by getting patients or caregivers involved with their clinician and active in the decision-making process.

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How CDS Tools Support Care Decisions

Clinical decision support (CDS) uses different tools to help providers, patients, and the care team make better care decisions. The information must be clear, well-organized, and fit into the provider’s workflow so they can act quickly and confidently. Different types of CDS work best for different kinds of care and settings.

These tools can include:

  • Order sets tailored to specific conditions
  • Patient data summaries and reports
  • Documentation templates
  • Diagnostic support
  • Reference materials relevant to the situation
  • Clinical guidelines
  • Computer alerts and reminders for providers and patients

To work well, CDS needs:

  • Medical knowledge that can be used by computers
  • Information specific to the individual patient
  • A system that combines this knowledge and data to give useful information in real time

CDS applications operate as components of comprehensive EHR systems or as stand-alone CDS systems or plug-ins to EHRs.

Improved Care Through Data Sharing

ONC supports efforts to develop, adopt, implement, and evaluate the use of CDS to improve healthcare decision-making.
We aim to help the healthcare industry create the technical infrastructure needed to allow health systems to share data with each other electronically to provide the most complete information possible into CDS systems. Complete records allow CDS systems to help with diagnoses and track for negative drug interactions by having a better view of a patient’s whole health.

Thoughtfully implemented CDS can have a number of important benefits, including:

  • Increased quality of care and enhanced health outcomes
  • Reduced errors and adverse events
  • Improved efficiency, cost-benefit, and provider and patient satisfaction

When implemented properly, CDS can reduce errors, improve the quality of care, reduce cost, and ease the cognitive and administrative burden on providers. CDS provides a platform for integrating evidence-based knowledge into care delivery by drawing upon both patient-specific data and research findings. By providing users with timely and meaningful data, CDS can help to avoid redundant testing or even identify alternative care approaches with better patient outcomes.

Optimizing Strategies for CDS

ONC collaborated with the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) to engage key experts and develop a series of strategies and recommendations to optimize CDS in support of improved care. The project’s goals were to identify actionable opportunities to accelerate progress in CDS creation, distribution, and use; inspire action on priority opportunities amongst diverse stakeholder groups; and to drive progress towards a usable, interoperable CDS. While some technologies have evolved since this report was published in 2016, most of the policy, workflow, and process considerations remain relevant and useful.

Additional CDS Resources