Overview
A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a tool that helps a doctor collect data and make decisions about patient care.
History and Etymology
The term was coined by Gerald A. Goertzel in 1969, who envisioned a system that would eliminate messy guessing and documentation in favor of a standard structured codes that computers could then analyze. Despite the recent hype around Artificial Intelligence, designs for automated systems to support experts go back to the mid-20th century, as soon as it became clear that computers would be more commonplace in institutions and eventually homes. Goertzel treated every entity in the patient’s record as a node in a network where relationships were mapped as edges between them. However, implementing these systems required doctors to translate their notes into codes that the computer would interpret, which they despised doing. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques that could parse handwritten notes or record human speech didn’t exist back then.