The challenge of comorbidities: should we focus on clinical decision support as much as medical education?

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Comorbidities present a great challenge to healthcare professionals and the health service. One in four patients now have two or more conditions. The prevalence of comorbidities increases with age and the population is continuing to grow older. Our response thus far has been slow and the solutions that have been suggested may not be scalable. There have been multiple calls for medical education to do more to address the issue of comorbidities. However existing ways of tackling this problem are unlikely to be scalable. It is impossible to learn and remember how to manage the many different potential combinations of acute diseases and comorbidities. Online clinical decision support has until the present enabled the management of patients with single conditions. But advances in clinical decision support can now enable the management of patients with multiple conditions.