CDS - Clinical Decision Support

Learn about Key Federal CDS Efforts

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) CDS Initiative aims to advance evidence into practice through CDS and make CDS more shareable, health information technology standards-based, and publicly-available. The initiative’s main components are

• CDS Connect features a prototype infrastructure for sharing interoperable CDS and includes a web-based repository of CDS artifacts, a CDS Authoring Tool that utilizes clinical quality language, other open-source software, and lessons learned from use case demonstrations.
• CDS Innovation Collaborative (CDSiC) - is a learning collaborative with a focus on patient-centered CDS. In contrast to traditional clinician-facing CDS, patient-centered CDS is CDS that focuses on the patient, or their caregiver, and facilitates their active involvement in health care decision-making with their clinicians. The CDSiC is bringing together diverse perspectives to produce resources and evidence to advance the field of patient-centered clinical decision support, making it more valuable and meaningful to patients, clinicians, and healthcare systems.
• Funding opportunities targeted to Digital Healthcare Research and clinical decision support efforts.
• CEDAR: The CEPI Evidence And Discovery (CEDAR) project aimed to make evidence repositories, such as those developed by AHRQ’s Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement (CEPI) more FAIR - findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable - through technologies such as application programming interfaces. Though future development of CEDAR ended in September 2023, the source code will continue to be available and health information technology developers, including eCQM and CDS developers, can incorporate the evidence and design new and exciting ways to make the information available where, when, and how stakeholders need it most. 
• An evaluation project that combines an evaluation of AHRQ’s CDS initiative with a horizon scan of the future of patient-centered CDS.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) also defines clinical decision support and recently introduced the term ‘decision support interventions’ with their updated EHR Certification Rule criteria under §170.315(b)(11).

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in their Digital Health Center of Excellence (DHCoE) provides information on device and non-device CDS in their final guidance document Clinical Decision Support Software.

Appropriate Use Criteria Program was a CMS program to promote the adoption of appropriate use criteria for advanced diagnostic imaging services through CDS. Appropriate use criteria are evidence-based and assist professionals who order and furnish applicable imaging services to make the most appropriate treatment decisions for a specific clinical condition.

Optimizing Strategies for Clinical Decision Support - The National Academy of Medicine and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology special publication summarizes a meeting series with multi-stakeholder experts who discussed the potential of CDS to transform care.

Adapting Clinical Guidelines for the Digital Age - American Journal of Medical Quality featured supplement including:

• Commentary: Modernizing Guidelines Development to Speed the Transfer of Science to Patient Care
• Adapting Clinical Guidelines for the Digital Age: Summary of a Holistic and Multidisciplinary Approach
• An Integrated Process for Co-Developing and Implementing Written and Computable Clinical Practice Guidelines
• An Evaluation Framework for a Novel Process to Codevelop Written and Computable Guidelines
• Adapted Kaizen: Multi-Organizational Complex Process Redesign for Adapting Clinical Guidelines for the Digital Age