NYSDA Publications

AHRQ Issues CDSiC Newsletter

Mar 18, 2025

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has issued its Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative (CDSiC) newsletter.

Issue Number 27 | March 18, 2025
In this edition of the Insider, we highlight four AHRQ CDSiC products focused on advancing standards for patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS), share a Leadership Viewpoint piece exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance PC CDS, and provide an update on the recent Mobilizing Computable Biomedical Knowledge (MCBK) North America Chapter Meeting.
Table of Contents:
 

Health information technology (health IT) standards are agreed-upon rules and guidelines that support the electronic exchange of data between different systems.  Standards are essential to promoting interoperability, or the ability of systems to work together.  Consistent standards help ensure that PC CDS tools incorporate the latest knowledge, are accessible wherever clinicians and patients want to receive them, and easy to understand and use for decision making.

Since standards are foundational to the adoption and implementation of PC CDS tools, the AHRQ CDSiC has long prioritized work in this critical area, developing several reports, resources, and tools to support the creation of standards-based PC CDS.  These include:

  • A comprehensive environmental scan that shares the current landscape of standards, federal initiatives, and regulatory frameworks for PC CDS
     
  • A two-page factsheet that summarizes key findings from the full environmental scan
     
  • A report that identifies opportunities for facilitating interoperability of patient apps with electronic health records and other health IT systems through adoption and use of standards
     
  • A resource that explores the standardization of patient preference information to enhance its use in PC CDS tools 

Click here to access all of the AHRQ CDSiC's resources on this key topic!

The use of AI in healthcare presents a key opportunity to improve care delivery and strengthen clinical decision making.  In response, the AHRQ CDSiC has explored AI's potential to enhance PC CDS and enable these valuable tools to reach more people.

The latest Leadership Viewpoint piece describes this recent work, which includes reports that explore patient perspectives on AI in PC CDS and how AI is being used to scale PC CDS, as well as two pilot projects that implemented AI-supported PC CDS tools in clinical settings.  The Viewpoint also highlights four themes that emerged from these efforts, which have important implications for the use of AI-supported PC CDS:

  • Promoting patient trust, transparency, and explainability in AI-supported PC CDS
     
  • Understanding how to scale AI-supported PC CDS
     
  • Keeping humans in the loop
     
  • Testing AI-supported PC CDS in the real world

Read more about this innovative work in the full Viewpoint!

MCBK is an international community from academia, the sciences, and government working together to ensure that biomedical knowledge in computable form is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.  The group’s most recent event, the MCBK North America Chapter Meeting, took place on February 27-28, 2025. 

Four AHRQ CDSiC resources were presented at the meeting's virtual poster session:

Find out more about the meeting on MCBK's website.

 
The Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative (CDSiC) is a community of broad, diverse stakeholders at the forefront of using technology to better support care teams, patients, and caregivers.  The CDSiC is working toward healthcare decisions that are driven by both patient-centered and patient-specific information and that align with patient needs, preferences, and values.  The CDSiC is funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) as part of a multi-component initiative to help advance patient-centered outcomes research into practice through CDS.  For any inquiries regarding the CDSiC you may contact the project team at CDSiC@norc.org.