Healthcare Information Technology Exam Guide for CompTIA Healthcare IT Technician and HIT Pro Certifications

Clinical Decision Support

CDS has come into its own over the past decade and, at least in principle, includes not only simple alerts but more sophisticated pop-ups, order trees, references, calculators, and rules that are meant to improve patient care by offering advice to the physician. Most of these are synchronous, in that they are dynamic and offer advice at the moment the clinical decision is being made (real time) rather than in retrospect (asynchronous). Given the complexity of medicine and the overwhelming and rapidly increasing medical literature, no physician, perhaps even within their own specialty, can realistically keep up with all of the available current evidence. To the extent that the computer can be used to improve medical care, ...