An Integration Framework for Clinical Decision Support Applications

Clinical Decision Support (CDS) applications have been widely recognized for improving health care quality and medical knowledge translation. However, its adoption and utilization in a real clinical environment is still subject to many factors, an important one of which is the lack of mechanism to easily integrate these applications to clinical workflow. This paper designs and develops an extensible CDS application integration and management system framework. This framework achieves interoperability between Clinical Information System (CIS) and CDS applications at two levels under predefined integration protocols; and through a mechanism of registration, management and delivery, various CDS applications can be delivered to targeted scenarios and executed in a context-aware way. This framework was validated in real clinical environment, and proved to be effective in both integration and interoperability. Meanwhile, targeted CDS application delivery further facilitates CDS in clinical promotion.