We have some answers, but implementing good decision support is still hard

Clinical decision support is the provision of “clinical knowledge and patient-related information, intelligently filtered or presented at appropriate times, to enhance patient care.”1 Medical institutions are increasingly adopting tools that offer decision support to improve patient outcomes and reduce errors. Healthcare providers and administrators with little or no training in computer science may be asked to evaluate, select, or contribute to the development of decision support systems for their practices. Is there an easy way to determine which clinical decision support systems are good?

In this issue Kawamoto and colleagues provide some evidence based guidance in a systematic analysis of the ability of decision support systems to improve practice in …