Clinical decision support for physician order-entry: design challenges

We report on a joint development effort between ALLTEL Information Services Health Care Division and IBM Worldwide Healthcare Industry to demonstrate concurrent clinical decision support using Arden Syntax at order-entry time. The goal of the partnership is to build a high performance CDS toolkit that may be easily customized for multiple health care enterprises. Our work uses and promotes open technologies and health care standards while building a generalizable interface to a legacy patient-care system and clinical database. This paper identifies four areas of design challenges and solutions unique to a concurrent order-entry environment: the clinical information model, the currency of the patient virtual chart, the granularity of event triggers and rule evaluation context, and performance.