Clinical decision support systems: potential with pitfalls.

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), an important part of clinical practice, are comprised of a: knowledge base; program for integrating patient-specific information with the knowledge-base; and, user-interface to allow clinicians to interact with the system and get the right information needed to make the right decision for the right patient at the right time. We review the common approaches to CDSS, their strengths and weaknesses and how they are evaluated and developed for clinical use.