Classification
Clinical decision support
Also known as: CDS, CDSS, clinical decision support system
Clinical decision support is software that provides clinicians with patient-specific information and recommendations to inform a clinical decision. The defining constraint is that it assists rather than replaces judgement — it issues no orders and makes no diagnoses, and the treating clinician remains responsible for every decision taken.
- Abbreviation
- CDS / CDSS
- Produces
- Patient-specific recommendations for clinician review
- Does not produce
- Diagnoses, orders, or treatment directives
- Responsibility
- Remains entirely with the treating clinician
Recommends versus decides
The distinction sounds like a legal formality and is in fact an architectural one. A system that recommends must be able to show its working — the evidence that triggered a recommendation, the rule or guideline behind it, and the version of that rule — because a clinician cannot exercise judgement over a conclusion they cannot inspect.
That requirement is what pushes safety-critical logic towards deterministic, versioned rules rather than model output. A rule that fires whenever its conditions are met can be tested, audited and reproduced months later. A probabilistic answer that is usually right cannot be examined the same way, and so cannot be reviewed in the sense clinical governance means by review.
In perioperative practice
Pathways Perioperative operates as clinical decision support: it produces severity-tiered risk flags with the triggering evidence, a guideline reference and a recommended action. It places no orders, clears no patients, and routes nobody to theatre on its own authority.