Understanding the Role of Pharmacometrics-Based Clinical Decision Support Systems in Pediatric Patient Management: A...

Pharmacometrics could play a key role in shifting pediatric pharmacotherapy from dosing for an average patient to individualizing dosing. Clinicians can have these quantitative tools at their disposal without requiring significant training through the development of clinical decision support systems with easy-to-use interfaces that have a back-end analysis engine or pharmacometric model that uses extensive electronic health record data to predict an individualized dose for each patient. There has been increased development of these clinical decision support systems recently, and for these tools to make the proper breakthrough into clinical practice, it is of utmost importance to perform rigorous testing to ensure adequate predictive performance. In this article, we walk through the components of a decision support tool and the testing required to determine its robustness using an example of a decision support tool we developed for vancomycin dosing in pediatrics.