Evaluating Clinical Decision Support Systems

There are a limited number of scientific studies concerned with the evaluation of DSS in general, and even less concerned with the evaluation of DSS in a clinical context. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the clinical DSS at the Department of Orthopedics at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in order to answer how one should evaluate clinical DSS. We have in our study created a research framework that assesses the effectiviness of clinical DSS within a hospital context. The framework examines if a clinical DSS fullfills a set of clinical DSS key contributions and what influence these key contributions have on decision outcome quality, decision-making process efficiency, and decision maker satisfaction. A qualitative case study has been done in order to measure these factors, and our findings shows that the clinical DSS used at the Department of Orthopedics at Sahlgrenska University Hospital is effective overall. However, not all of these factors were conclusive due to the early phase of system use. Our study also shows a number of new findings that haven't been present in existing theory on clinical DSS, where the most important one highlights the role of law and regulation with regards to clinical DSS evaluation and use. Evaluating Clinical Decision Support Systems Dahlstedt & Roos