Summary
Objective: The objective of this review is to summarize the state of the art of clinical decision
support (CDS) circa 1990, review progress in the 25 year interval from that time,
and provide a vision of what CDS might look like 25 years hence, or circa 2040. Method:
Informal review of the medical literature with iterative review and discussion among
the authors to arrive at six axes (data, knowledge, inference, architecture and technology,
implementation and integration, and users) to frame the review and discussion of selected
barriers and facilitators to the effective use of CDS.
Result: In each of the six axes, significant progress has been made. Key advances
in structuring and encoding standardized data with an increased availability of data,
development of knowledge bases for CDS, and improvement of capabilities to share knowledge
artifacts, explosion of methods analyzing and inferring from clinical data, evolution
of information technologies and architectures to facilitate the broad application
of CDS, improvement of methods to implement CDS and integrate CDS into the clinical
workflow, and increasing sophistication of the end-user, all have played a role in
improving the effective use of CDS in healthcare delivery.
Conclusion: CDS has evolved dramatically over the past 25 years and will likely evolve just as
dramatically or more so over the next 25 years. Increasingly, the clinical encounter
between a clinician and a patient will be supported by a wide variety of cognitive
aides to support diagnosis, treatment, care-coordination, surveillance and prevention,
and health maintenance or wellness.
Keywords
Clinical decision support - electronic health record - health information technology
- expert systems - artificial intelligence