Integration of heterogeneous clinical decision support systems and their knowledge sets: feasibility study with Drug-Drug Interaction alerts.

There exist limitations in both commercial and in-house clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) and issues related to the integration of different knowledge sources and CDSSs. We chose Standard-based Shareable Active Guideline Environment (SAGE) as a new architecture with knowledge integration and a centralized knowledge base which includes authoring/management functions and independent CDSS, and applied it to Drug-Drug Interaction (DDI) CDSS. The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of the newly integrated DDI alerting CDSS into a real world hospital information system involving construction of an integrated CDSS derived from two heterogeneous systems and their knowledge sets. The proposed CDSS was successfully implemented and compensated for the weaknesses of the old CDSS from knowledge integration and management, and its applicability in actual situations was verified. Although the DDI CDSS was constructed as an example case, the new CDS architecture might prove applicable to areas of CDSSs.