Decision time for clinical decision support systems

Clinical decision support systems are interactive software systems designed to help clinicians with decision-making tasks, such as determining a diagnosis or recommending a treatment for a patient. Clinical decision support systems are a widely researched topic in the computer science community, but their inner workings are less well understood by, and known to, clinicians. This article provides a brief explanation of clinical decision support systems and some examples of real-world systems. It also describes some of the challenges to implementing these systems in clinical environments and posits some reasons for the limited adoption of decision-support systems in practice. It aims to engage clinicians in the development of decision support systems that can meaningfully help with their decision-making tasks and to open a discussion about the future of automated clinical decision support as a part of healthcare delivery.