Clinical Decision Support systems have
become an integral part of medicine, and allow employers across the medical
field to make fast, knowledgeable and safe decisions on how to treat patients.
When prior to the implementation of systems like clinical DSS doctors relied on
only prior experiences shared between colleagues and input received from around
them, a doctor can now use a separate software with knowledge of patient
records, allergies, and even proven ways to treat certain diseases. “Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs)
form a significant part of the field of clinical knowledge management
technologies through their capacity to support the clinical process and use of
knowledge, from diagnosis and investigation through treatment and long-term care.”[1]
As patients everyone wants to feel as
confortable and confident in the decisions that our doctors make for when it
comes to our well being. Being mistreated is a fear that everyone must feel.
With systems such as CDSS our doctors are being given the best us the best
chance they could have. By putting together knowledge a doctor has seen and
learned over his career and combining it with the organizational and analytical
properties that the DSS provides gives the chance of having the best treatment
possible. “The purpose and goal of this
technology is that, by combing the knowledge of the healthcare provider with
the knowledge of historical trend data, the resulting decision will be a
generated from a more thorough analysis of the patient’s data than the clinician
or the decision support system could make individually.” [2]Able
to scan and process data on case sensitive elements CDSS can provide that extra
angle or option that the doctor may not have seen.
The quest for more ways to analyze
data and more ways to get more information are still being explored in the CDSS
field as well. There is always something that may have been missed that could
be the piece to solve the mystery of the illness. An example is something
called Natural Language processing, which hopefully someday will be
incorporated into CDSS. “The promise is
for NLP algorithms to analyze ordinary sentences and extract critical medical
terms to derive possible causes of a patient's symptoms and recommend treatment
options”[3].
This technology could break down language borders between doctors and patients
in different ethnic areas of the country and world. Doctors could travel to
third world countries with the CDSS software and speak to the sick people in
different villages, and be able to clearly understand where they had been in
the prior days or months, and what things they could have came into contact.
This could prevent and help understand the spread of rampant disease in these
parts of the world.
The proper definition of a CDSS is “an interactive decision support
system (DSS) Computer Software, which is designed to
assist physicians
and other health professionals with decision making tasks, such as determining
diagnosis
of patient data.”[4] Since the start of medicine doctors have
been searching for different ways to assist them along in their studies of the
human body. From back in renaissance Europe when men would grave rob bodies in
order to dissect them to understand the inner workings of the body, to the inception
of medical schools where knowledge could be spread and taught on a universal
scale, these new systems are one of the biggest innovations medicine has seen.
Able to store more data and information, and be able to present it at the touch
of a button, better than any human mind, these systems will help to saves
thousands eventually millions of lives. Decisions will be made more swiftly and
confidently when time is of the essence because of CDSS. The conclusion of all
this is that clinical decision support systems have become an invaluable tool
for the medical world, and will continue to change them in the future as well.
