A Roadmap for National Action on Clinical Decision Support

Clinical decision support (CDS) provides clinicians, staff, patients, or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information to enhance health and health care.  This document, a white paper approved by the AMIA Board of Directors, presents a roadmap for national action on clinical decision support.  The roadmap identifies three pillars for fully realizing the promise of CDS: having the best available clinical knowledge well-organized for CDS interventions; high adoption and effective use of CDS tools; and continuous improvement of knowledge and CDS methods.  Two levels of activity are presented in the roadmap: a comprehensive work plan and a critical path for CDS activities.  The comprehensive work plan outlines the full set of tasks necessary to create a robust infrastructure in which to develop CDS interventions.  The critical path tasks represent a subset of the comprehensive work plan that can be readily implemented and produce results in the short term.  The full text of this paper is published on the AMIA Web site (PDF, 1.31 MB) .