Details of a successful clinical decision support system.

Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) with clinical decision support (CDS) is regarded as one of the most effective ways to improve the quality of health care and increase patient safety. As electronic medical records become more available, such systems will increasingly become the method of choice to achieve these goals. Creating a CPOE/CDS system is a complex task, and some fail despite time consuming and expensive development. The CPOE system at the Regenstrief Institute incorporates sophisticated CDS and is one of the oldest and most successful in the U.S. Many years in development, it is currently used by hundreds of providers. Our well established, successful system can serve as a template or model for the future development of similar systems. We recently completed a full analysis of our CPOE/CDS system and present details of its structure, functionality and contents.