Are Clinical Decision Support Systems Useful for Your Health Organisation?

There has been a lot of hue and cry regarding the utility of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) all over the world and especially among developed countries. I say that because developing countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh do not have the necessary resources to think about implementing these systems on a massive scale. However, it will be interesting to explore if health professionals using clinical decision support systems really find them useful. This is important as most of the developed countries such as the United Kingdom (UK) have taken numerous initiatives to push CDSS implementation.

What do you understand by CDSS?

Clinical decision support systems are software that can be integrated within the healthcare system to assist medical professionals in decision making such as drug dosage based on clinical history and diagnostics. However, these systems serve the purpose of only assisting clinicians in their decisions and are not the active decision makers in healthcare organisations.

Strengths

Various studies such as Olakotan & Yusof (2021) have supported the utility of CDSS in improving efficiency of healthcare by automating processes and integrating patient data thereby saving time and resources. So the key advantage from the use of CDSS in your healthcare organisation is cost savings. There are many other advantages such as organisation and analysis of complex clinical data; and an improvement in quality of diagnosis and patient care.

I would like to emphasise on the advantage of enhanced diagnosis as misdiagnosis is a serious cause of concern worldwide. It is estimated that nearly 11% of the medical problems result in misdiagnosis (Mary, 2023). Therefore, it may be a wise choice to implement CDSS in your health organisation considering patient safety and health prospects. King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center (KFSH&RC) has successfully implemented CDSS for cancer and influenza screening with substantial benefits derived in diagnosis.

Drawbacks

On performing a secondary research in academic search databases such as Google Scholars, it was found that some studies such as Kwan et al. (2020) have reported the phenomenon of alert fatigue among clinicians using CDSS. In simple language, alert fatigue results from repetitive reminders and messages originating from CDSS that makes clinicians tired and they reach a stage when they start ignoring these alerts.

Another issue with CDSS lies in its complexity and poor design that makes its use cumbersome for many professionals. In this regard, a study by Yoo et al. (2022) has reported the mismatch between CDSS interface design and medical standards. Therefore, your health organisation must carefully review usability aspects such as design and features of CDSS before implementation.

Conclusion

Well, the decision to implement CDSS will depend on your size, scale of operations, financial resources and medical needs. I would say do not just jump into buying a CDSS for the sake of it. Review the pros and cons and then make a decision.