Toward Scalable Clinical Decision Support

Abstract

In this special issue of the Open Medical Informatics Journal, four papers are presented describing various approaches to the general problem of scaling clinical decision support (CDS) -providing CDS across potentially multiple electronic medical record systems (EMR) in varying clinical practice environments, and the methods of representing, encoding, and sharing knowledge to support such services.Each describes and employs a variety of techniques to approach critical problems in this area of clinical informatics research and development: knowledge translation and specification, knowledge aggregation and dissemination, and knowledge implementation for CDS in EMRs, and other forms of health IT.These papers provide an excellent overview of current research and development activities in this area, and hold great promise for describing methods that ultimately will enable widespread adoption and use of best practices and current clinical guideline knowledge at scale.