AHRQ: Defining the next generation of clinical decision support

Clinical decision support is only as useful as the evidence behind it, and turning that evidence into something software can actually use is hard. A federal health agency set out to define what computable evidence and guidance tools should look like, drawing on a highly diverse cross-sector community.

We led the health IT informatics work for the effort. We facilitated working sessions with clinicians, researchers, guideline developers, decision-support implementers, and patient representatives, and translated their input into concrete functional requirements. We then built working concept demonstrations using standards-based, FHIR-aligned approaches.

The work produced a structured set of use cases and capabilities that define how computable clinical guidance can be developed, processed, and shared, along with demonstrations that showed the approach working in practice.

The result is a foundation for the next generation of computable clinical decision support, grounded in real stakeholder needs and open standards.