Decision-Making in Healthcare: Clinical Decision Support Systems

Decision-Making in Healthcare
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Decision-Making in Healthcare
Article Summary
Sutton et al.'s (2020) "An Overview of Clinical Decision Support Systems: Benefits, Risks, and Strategies for Success" focuses on the use of computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSS). Decision-making processes in the healthcare sector have significantly changed due to technological advancement. In particular, CDSS improves the delivery of healthcare services by facilitating proper decision-making through sharing patient information and clinical knowledge among healthcare professionals. Today, some CDSS systems are capable of leveraging data that are uninterpretable or unobtainable by individuals (Sutton et al., 2020). CDSS was first implemented in the healthcare industry in the 1970s. At that time, they were poorly designed or integrated and had limited academic pursuits. Currently, CDSSs are integrated into applications, such as the computerized provider order entry (CPOE) and electronic health records (EHR). Moreover, they are administered via smartphones, tablets, computers, and other electronic devices.
The United States of America (USA) government has endorsed the use of CDSSs by incentivizing the implementation of these systems alongside EHRs. For example, in 2013, approximately 41% of hospitals in the USA had implemented EHRs and CDSSs (Sutton et al., 2020). In particular, proper decision-making in the healthcare sector is enhanced by the availability of reliable data. CDSS has a significant scope of functions, including drug control, disease management, data retrieval, alarm systems, patient diagnostics, and prescriptions. Since CDSS facilitates effective decision-making in the medical field, they provide various advantages. They include patient safety, cost containment, clinical data management, system maintenance, diagnostic support, administrative functions, workflow improvement, and better documentation (Sutton et al., 2020). For instance, integrating EHRs and CDSSs ensures that healthcare professionals can ge...