Mission

This group supports the HL7 mission to create and promote its standards by working on issues related to single-patient-focused and population health care decision support capabilities. The work group will focus on development of standards to support system-agnostic implementations of clinical decision support, including messages, services, information models, and knowledge representation formalisms.

Charter

The role of this work group is to (a) identify the scope and range of information models and knowledge representation formalisms required for the functionality of decision support capabilities; (b) work with other HL7 work groups or outside organizations to identify appropriate controlled vocabularies for encoding data elements required for decision support; and (c) identify or define messages, objects and services required to support the specific information exchange needs of decision support applications, both as feeders to decision support applications and as output from decision support applications.

Decision Making Practices

http://www.hl7.org/participate/decisionmaking.cfm

Work Products and Contributions to HL7 Processes

Work on standards for representation and presentation of knowledge in health care decision support, including Decision Support Services, Infobuttons and Order Sets
Work will include patient-centered monitoring, alerts and reminders
Work will include population-centric monitoring and management, including support of quality measures and surveillance of disease and adverse events.
Participate in the development of any standards for representation of clinical guidelines that may become part of HL7
Maintain an expression language for clinical decision support
Develop a data model specifically tailored for clinical decision support
Identify existing HL7 messages and triggers that may be usable for decision support
Contribute representations of messages and other objects required by decision support applications, including those between decision support and other applications, to the HL7 Reference Information Model
Help develop authoring, demonstration and validation software tools for clinical decision support

Formal Relationships With Other HL7 Groups

The Clinical Decision Support Work Group maintains a strong working relationship with the Arden Syntax Work Group, insofar as the Arden Syntax is a particular knowledge formalism for health care decision support. Through the Clinical Quality Framework Initiative, this work group also maintains a strong working relationship with the Clinical Quality Information Work Group. This work group collaborates with the Clinical Genomics, Orders and Observations, Patient Care, Pharmacy, and Structured Documents work groups on projects that have decision support dimensions. Through the HL7 Services Oriented Architecture Work Group, the Clinical Decision Support Work Group also collaborates with the Object Management Group on standards related to the Healthcare Services Specification Project.