The Impact of Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) on Physicians: A Scoping Review

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs) are used in a clinical setting to help physicians make decisions to improve clinical performance and patient care. There are many benefits to the implementation and adoption of CDSSs, such as reducing the rate of misdiagnosis, improving efficiency and patient care, and reducing the risk of medication errors. On the other hand, CDSSs can have several disadvantages. For example, physicians can see CDSSs as a threat to their clinical autonomy. CDSSs can also be very costly to adopt, maintain, and support. These advantages and disadvantages can have both positive and negative impacts on physicians. We conducted a scoping review to explore the impact of CDSSs on physicians. We searched the following electronic databases: CINAHL, PubMed, and Google Scholar. Two reviewers independently selected the retrieved studies and extracted data from the included studies. A narrative approach was used to synthesize the extracted data. We included 14 studies of the 300 retrieved studies. We identified the following positive impacts: work efficiency, providing more personalized care, improving care and knowledge, increasing confidence in making decisions, improving prescribing behavior, and reducing the number of ordered laboratory and medical imaging tests. Several negative impacts were also reported by the studies, namely: inefficient documentation, interruption in the patient-physician communication, and an increase in unnecessary referrals.