What is Clinical Decision Support Systems

Computer-based information systems used to integrate clinical and patient information and provide support for decision-making in patient care.

Computer-based information systems used to integrate clinical and patient information and provide support for decision-making in patient care.

Software designed to assist physicians with decision making task.

Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are software systems that analyze information from electronic health records (EHRs) and provide recommendations and alerts to help healthcare professionals follow evidence-based clinical standards during treatment.

Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) are interactive computer programs, which are intended to assist physicians or other healthcare professionals with decision making. CDSS link clinical or health observations with accumulated facts and/or knowledge influence decision choices by clinicians for improved personalised healthcare. CDSS usually contains a (medical) knowledge base and a reasoning mechanism (often these are a set of rules derived from the experts and the evidence-based medicine principle), used to derive conclusions from future observations. Typical examples of CDSS include rule-based expert systems, like the CDSS pioneer, MYCIN, and Computer-Assisted Detection (CAD) systems assisting radiologists in analyzing and evaluating medical images comprehensively in a short time, for example detecting a likely tumour. The objective and the main challenge of the HeC project is to develop a CDSS making use of (distributed) data of different modalities (clinical, imaging and genetic) and of different vertical levels (molecule, tissue, organ, individual, and population), as a part of the European paediatric platform being implemented.