CDS- Clinical Decision Support Definition:
An application that uses pre-established rules and guidelines that can be created and edited by the healthcare organization, and integrates clinical data from several sources to generate alerts and treatment suggestions.
ie. Alert set up for patients who have potassium below 2.5% should not have a cardiac glycoside. When the physician enters a prescription for a cardiac glycoside, the system prompts an alert that the patient should not be given the medication due to low level potassium in his blood.
A physician may enter a possible diagnosis into the system and then receive feedback from the system regarding possibility of that being true. Clinical decision support systems are intended to receive patient data and utilize that data to propose possible diagnoses and courses of action.
Many EMRs support clinical decision support, in which the computer enables health professionals to make informed clinical decisions.
Benefits of Clinical Decision Support Systems:
- Improve Phsyician performance
- Increases the amount of data available for clinical use
- Reduces medical errors
- Influences medical decisions at point of care.
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