CDS Consortium Overview

Blackford Middleton, MD, MPH, MSc, Clinical Informatics Research and Development, Partners HealthCare System, Inc. Clinical decision support (CDS) has proved to be a powerful tool for improving the quality of patient care and reducing healthcare expenses, but currently has opposing evidence suggesting the occurrence of unintended consequences and potential new medical errors when not properly implemented or used. The Clinical Decision Support Consortium is a Harvard-based, federally-funded, academic-industrial international research collaborative focused on advancing the adoption and effective use of clinical decision support in healthcare at scale. The CDS Consortium delivers the following key products, services, and resources to enable cost-effective knowledge management and implementation of clinical decision support: (1) methods for translating human-readable guidelines into machine-executable format, (2) a publicly available Knowledge Management Portal for content sharing and collaboration among all CDS Consortium participants, (3) cloud-based CDS services, (4) a research and development lab, (5) education, and (6) consulting services. The CDS Consortium’s web-based CDS services have been integrated into the Partners HealthCare Longitudinal Medical Record and Regenstrief Institute EHR, with plans to expand our CDS services to NextGen and GE EHR sites. In the subsequent 3-5 years, the CDS Consortium aims to advance clinical decision support content standardization efforts and expand its activity to the HIT arena.