CDSiC Project Overview

Central to AHRQ’s Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Initiative is advancing the uptake of PCOR findings into practice with a focus on patient-centered CDS.

Launched in 2021, the Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative (CDSiC) is a community of broad, diverse stakeholders at the forefront of using technology to better support care teams, patients, and caregivers. The CDSiC is working toward healthcare decisions that are driven by both patient-centered and patient-specific information and that align with patient needs, preferences, and values.

CDS refers to digital tools used to help inform patient care. PC CDS is CDS that centers on the patient or their caregiver and facilitates their active involvement in healthcare decision-making with their care team. PC CDS is the focus of the CDSiC, and we believe it has the potential to be transformative to enable higher-quality care delivery and improved outcomes.

The CDSiC aims to shape the current and future landscape of CDS by developing products that will help advance CDS that is patient-centered, serving as a proving ground of innovation for CDS concepts, and developing resources to support the advancement, testing, implementing, tracking, and measuring of patient-centered CDS in the real world. The CDSiC further aspires to shape the future of PC CDS by identifying gaps and opportunities to achieve a world in which patients, caregivers, and care teams receive evidence-based information to support shared decision-making.

The CDSiC is strategically organized into three Centers that emphasize patient-centeredness:

• The Operations Center is the heart of the Collaborative, playing an instrumental role in shaping the strategic direction, disseminating findings, and advancing the field of PC CDS. The Operations Center also houses a Steering Committee of nationally recognized multidisciplinary experts who advise and inform a vision for the CDSiC.
• The Stakeholder Community and Outreach Center (Stakeholder Center) provides thought leadership for the Collaborative, drawing from the expertise of a range of stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, researchers, health IT and CDS developers, informaticians, payers, and policymakers. These stakeholders are organized in four topic-focused workgroups: 1) CDS Outcomes and Objectives, 2) Scaling, Measurement, and Dissemination of CDS, 3) Trust and Patient-Centeredness, and 4) CDS Standards and Regulatory Frameworks. These Workgroups develop products such as environmental scans, research agendas, and frameworks that advance the field of PC CDS. Read more about the Stakeholder Center.
• The Innovation Center is the Collaborative’s research and development hub that facilitates real-world application of CDSiC tools, learnings, and insights. The Innovation Center has two Cores: 1) the Measurement and Value of CDS Core and 2) the Conducting and Coordinating CDS Projects Core. Read more about the Innovation Center. 

CDSiC’s Vision and Mission

The activities of the CDSiC are guided by its Vision and Mission statements, which describe what the CDSiC hopes to achieve (Vision) and what the CDSiC will do to achieve this (Mission).

CDSiC’s Vision

A world where patients, caregivers, and care teams have the right information at the right time to make evidence-informed decisions that improve health and well-being for all individuals.

CDSiC’s Mission

CDSiC aims to advance the design, development, dissemination, implementation, use, measurement, and evaluation of evidence-based, shareable, interoperable, and publicly available patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS) to improve health outcomes of all patients by creating a proving ground of innovation. To achieve this, CDSiC will: 

• Create a learning community to share and advance the knowledge, tools, standards, frameworks, and techniques for designing, developing, implementing, using, measuring, and evaluating high-quality PC CDS.
• Promote the practice and adoption of PC CDS that facilitates whole-person care and considers the patient, caregiver, and clinician workflows; preferences; and values around shared decision making.
• Advance standards-based PC CDS that can be shared with patients, caregivers, clinicians, healthcare organizations, and health IT developers across the United States and result in measurable improvements in healthcare, patient health, patient care experience, and provider experience.

CDSiC's Work

To advance the CDSiC’s mission, the CDSiC Stakeholder Center Workgroups are currently developing 12 products, while the Innovation Center is undertaking 3 projects, that will also include additional related outputs. As a starting place for the CDSiC’s work, the Innovation Center developed a PC CDS lifecycle diagram that highlights the steps that must be navigated by all participants in the healthcare delivery system, including patients and their caregivers, for PC CDS to be successful. The project summary below describes the 12 products and 3 projects under the CDSiC’s development and indicates how the products and projects address key areas of the lifecycle.

Click here to download the full project summary.

CDSiC Leadership

The CDSiC Leadership team serves as the command center for the project, driving the vision and strategy while providing strategic, technical, operational, and managerial oversight.

Leadership Team Members

• Edwin Lomotan, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
• James Swiger, MBE: AHRQ
• Prashila Dullabh, MD, FAMIA: NORC at the University of Chicago (NORC) – Principal Investigator
• Dean Sittig, PhD: NORC – Co-Investigator
• David Lobach, MD, PhD, MS, FACMI: Elimu Informatics – Co-Investigator
• Rina Dhopeshwarkar, MPH: NORC – Operations Center Lead
• Priyanka Desai, PhD, MSPH, CPH: NORC – Stakeholder and Outreach Center Co-Lead
• Elizabeth Cope, PhD, MPH: AcademyHealth – Stakeholder and Outreach Center Co-Lead
• Adam Wright, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA, FIAHSI: Vanderbilt University Medical Center – Co-Lead for Innovation Center Core 2
• Aziz Boxwala, MD, PhD: Elimu Informatics – Co-Lead for Innovation Center Core 2

Contact Us

To contact the project team, please email them at: cdsic@norc.org

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