A highly scalable, interoperable clinical decision support service.

OBJECTIVE: To create a clinical decision support (CDS) system that is shareable across healthcare delivery systems and settings over large geographic regions.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: The enterprise clinical rules service (ECRS) realizes nine design principles through a series of enterprise java beans and leverages off-the-shelf rules management systems in order to provide consistent, maintainable, and scalable decision support in a variety of settings.
RESULTS: The ECRS is deployed at Partners HealthCare System (PHS) and is in use for a series of trials by members of the CDS consortium, including internally developed systems at PHS, the Regenstrief Institute, and vendor-based systems deployed at locations in Oregon and New Jersey. Performance measures indicate that the ECRS provides sub-second response time when measured apart from services required to retrieve data and assemble the continuity of care document used as input. DISCUSSION: We consider related work, design decisions, comparisons with emerging national standards, and discuss uses and limitations of the ECRS.
CONCLUSIONS: ECRS design, implementation, and use in CDS consortium trials indicate that it provides the flexibility and modularity needed for broad use and performs adequately. Future work will investigate additional CDS patterns, alternative methods of data passing, and further optimizations in ECRS performance.