Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs): State of the art Review of Literature

One of the major advances in medical practice and healthcare is to incorporate decision support systems (DSS) in such practices to assist healthcare staff. The present study aimed to make a general understanding framework about state of the art clinical decision support systems (CDSS). The design was systematic review. According to Research keywords (decision, decision-making, clinical decision, clinical decision-making, decision support, decision support system, clinical decision support system), Persian and English papers and scientific literature in scientific data bases include Simorgh, MagIran, and SID for Persian, as well as Science Direct, Google Scholar, Google Patent, Wikipedia, PubMed, Sage, and Springer for English resources were searched, so that from a basic sample of 1247 papers, 27 papers were selected regarding inclusion criteria. Delphi method was implemented to construct the final format of results report. The method of data analysis were librarian and content analysis. Two main definitions of CDSS, 13 popular CDSSs, major aims of usage, practical and theoretical benefits, principal methods of decision support, three major classifications, medical/clinical data mining, EBM, and efficacy of CDSS have been evaluated and discussed. The usage of CDSS in clinical and healthcare settings is increasing. It has been shown that incorporation of CDSS can significantly improve health outcome indices. However, authorities shall establish standards and quality control systems to evaluate and integrate development and implementation procedures of CDSS. In addition, future studies would better head-to-head compare alike CDSS to evaluate competitive advantages and concurrent validity of various CDSSs.