Clinical Decision Support (CDS)

Overview | PCOR CDS Initiative | PC-CDS Leaning Network | CDS Connect Project | CDS Demonstrations | CDS eRecommendations | CDS White Papers | CDS Guide | CDS Podcast Series | CDS Town Hall Meeting

Overview

Clinical decision support (CDS) has the ability to significantly impact improvements in quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has long supported efforts to develop, adopt, implement, and evaluate the use of CDS to improve health care decisionmaking.

To date, AHRQ has funded several research projects involving CDS, including the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Initiative, two demonstrations supported by a panel of technical experts, the development of white papers, and outreach efforts to develop consensus in the health care field around the use of CDS to promote safe and effective health care. These research efforts work to engage relevant stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, provider organizations, guideline and quality measurement developers, and information technology professionals, in the ongoing work to improve health care decisionmaking using CDS systems.

Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Initiative

AHRQ launched an initiative in 2016 to disseminate and implement patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) findings through clinical decision support (CDS). This initiative has two main goals:

• To advance the movement of evidence into practice through CDS; and 
• To make CDS more shareable, standards-based, and publicly-available. 

To help reach these goals, the initiative has four components:

1. Engaging stakeholders such as patients, researchers, health IT vendors, payers, provider organizations, and many more 
2. Building prototype infrastructure for developing and sharing CDS 
3. Advancing research on how CDS can help disseminate and implement evidence in clinical practice 
4. Evaluating the overall initiative 

For the first component, AHRQ awarded a cooperative agreement to Research Triangle Institute (Principal Investigator Barry Blumenfeld). Over the course of this grant, which ended in 2020, the project team built a community called the Patient-Centered CDS (PCCDS) Learning Network, which brought together multiple public and private stakeholders to advance the concept of patient-centered CDS. Engaging stakeholders, including patients, continues to be an important aspect of other ongoing components of AHRQ’s CDS initiative.

For the second component, AHRQ awarded a contract to the MITRE Corporation (Project Director Lacy Fabian). This project team built CDS Connect, an online platform for sharing interoperable CDS that includes a repository of publicly-available CDS artifacts, open source tools such as a CDS Authoring Tool, and a public work group.

For the third component, AHRQ has released grant funding opportunities to better understand how CDS can be used to advance evidence into practice. Information about current AHRQ funding opportunities can be found at https://www.ahrq.gov/funding/fund-opps/index.html. In addition, AHRQ awarded two demonstration contracts focused on CDS for chronic pain management, one to MedStar Health Research Institute (Project Directors Kristen Miller and Zach Hettinger) and one to RTI International (Project Director Barry Blumenfeld). These projects are developing CDS for both clinicians and patients.

For the fourth component, AHRQ awarded a contract to NORC at the University of Chicago to undertake a programmatic evaluation of the CDS initiative thus far and to conduct a horizon scan of the future of patient-centered CDS. More information about this effort will be forthcoming.

For more information about AHRQ's CDS initiative, please visit https://cds.ahrq.gov.

PC-CDS Learning Network

The Learning Network was a learning collaborative that informed and connected a wide variety of stakeholders to address the challenges and opportunities of patient-centered CDS. The project team developed the Analytical Framework for Action (AFA), which represents a life cycle of patient-centered CDS, including prioritizing, authoring, implementing, and measuring CDS interventions. Through its resource center, annual conferences, and multiple work groups, the Learning Network prioritized patient engagement and promoted patient-centered CDS in innovative ways.

CDS Connect Project

CDS Connect is a project to demonstrate how evidence-based care can be more rapidly incorporated into clinical practice through interoperable decision support. Its main focus is on prototype infrastructure for sharing, authoring, and learning from other CDS developers and implementers. Highlights include a repository of publicly-available CDS resources or “artifacts”, a CDS Authoring tool that enables creation of HL7 Clinical Quality Language, demonstration of open software packages (e.g., a Pain Management Summary SMART on FHIR app), and a public work group to inform the project’s direction.

CDS Demonstrations

In 2008, AHRQ awarded two 5-year demonstration contracts focused on the development, adoption, implementation, and evaluation of clinical decision support (CDS). The contracts were awarded to the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA (Project Director: Blackford Middleton, M.D.; Clinical Decision Support Consortium) and Yale University in New Haven, CT (Project Director: Richard Shiffman, M.D.; Guidelines Into Decision Support).

While working with a Technical Expert Panel, these projects were to advance our understanding of how best to incorporate CDS into the delivery of health care. The projects explored how the translation of clinical knowledge into CDS can be routinized in practice and taken to scale in order to improve the quality of health care delivery in the United States. An early report, Challenges and Barriers to Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Implementation (PDF, 254 KB), describes the challenges and barriers that the contractors encountered as part of their CDS demonstration project.

After 5 years, both projects demonstrated the ability to translate evidence-based knowledge into useful, actionable guidance for clinical care through CDS. Available below are links to a comprehensive report detailing the approach, methods, and lessons learned for each project as well as further research questions and policy considerations for the field and accompanying videos about each project.

• Findings and Lessons From AHRQ’s Clinical Decision Support Demonstrations Projects (PDF, 2.61 MB)
• Clinical Decision Support Consortium project video (6 min., 53 sec.)
• Guidelines Into Decision Support project video (7 min., 50 sec.)

Translating clinical guidelines into clinical decision support (CDS) rules has been an active area of research for many years. A key barrier to doing so has been the need to translate narrative recommendations from prose to unambiguous, coded formats that can be implemented by various clinical information systems and care settings. The AHRQ eRecommendations project addressed this barrier and laid the groundwork for further CDS advancements by formalizing the translation process and developing an “eRecommendations” format.

This project developed structured, coded logic statements called "eRecommendations" for 45 A- and B-graded recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and 12 recommendations relevant to the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs. These eRecommendations leveraged standard data elements, coding systems, and value sets developed for performance reporting. Pilot testing was conducted at Memorial Hermann Health System and with the Louisiana Health IT Regional Extension Center.

To learn more about the project, read the Final Report (PDF, 2.17 MB) and visit the AHRQ eRecommendations project profile.