Clinical Decision Support

Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is composed of a set of tools, technologies and processes that allow to define, manage and use rules to generate meaningful clinical content like alerts, recommendations and reminders to help clinicians on their decision process when treating a patient.

CDS should be a goal of any EHR because it could have a direct proactive effect in the quality of care. Think for a moment on a perfect EHR that has all the patient's data in it, which allows a clinician to access all that data. But it will difficult for a person to process all that information, an it will be even more difficult to combine data, use clinical protocols, and correlate events on the same time line, that might affect the patient's health.

For instance, an EHR with a CDS component would be capable of recommending a gynecologist that the patient needs a PAP smear if the patient is older than 40 and didn't have one in the last two years. This is actually a CDS rule that is very simple to automate and has a huge impact in early detection of cervical cancer. Many rules like these could be implemented for different patient profiles and conditions, and Atomik can play an important role in this context, by being a standardized data source for evaluating CDS rules.