Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) | Report

Running head: HEALTH INFORMATICS
Health informatic
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1HEALTH INFORMATICS
Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is an emerging information management tool
in health care that aids in clinical decision making process. Some of the problems that
resulted in the development of this tool included growth in demand for quality and quality of
clinical data. With big data and utilization, digital tools like electronic health records (EHRs)
and computerised physician order entry (CPOE) reduces the hassles involved in managing
data and decreased rate of errors in clinical setting. However, high quality decision support
was needed to reap the full benefits of EHR and CPOE. CDSS fulfilled this need by giving
active and passive advice based on set of patient data [1]. Thus, CDSS implementation has
been associated with many positive impacts on organizations and individuals.
CDSS has helped in positively influencing patient care and safety outcomes. It has
worked to eliminate common errors that occur during medication administration process thus
leading to medication safety. The tool use case-based reasoning to provide support to
clinicians in clinical decision making. Certain characteristics of individual patient are
matched to computerized knowledge base and software algorithm works to generate specific
recommendation for patient. In the area of medication administration, it provides advice or
reminders on drug selection, allergies, dosage and possible drug-drug interactions about
patient [2]. Thus, medication safety has increased with the implementation of CDSS in health
care settings. CDSS has resulted in improvement in process of care, preventive care and
reduce the clinical and cost related outcomes thus leading to many positive benefits for health
care organization [4].
Health care professionals like nurse and physicians have acknowledged the utility of
CDSS implementation during the care process. A focus group study done with physicians
and nurses revealed that they found the reminders given by this tool to be very effective as it