ABSTRACT
At the dawn of the 21st century, the US healthcare system is experiencing an information revolution. Scientific and clinical knowledge has expanded beyond the capacity of the average practitioner’s ability to synthesize and apply knowledge at the bedside or in the clinic. A clinical decision support systems (CDSS) is software that uses individual patient data, population statistics, and computerized clinical knowledge to offer real-time, patient-specific information management, assessment, and recommendations. When information shared by different computer systems is understood at the level of formally defined domain concepts, semantic interoperability occurs between two or more computer systems. Computerized provider order entry is becoming the touchstone of patient safety initiatives. The computer algorithms of CDSS should be able to automatically screen for and alert on inconsistencies between patients’ antimicrobial drug therapies and their microbiology susceptibility test results, in addition to generating alerts that narrow the drug spectrum when appropriate.
