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AFA graphic
Infographic: Analytic Framework for Action

The Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support (PC CDS) Analytic Framework for Action (AFA) is an important conceptual framework to help guide the creation, identification, prioritization, implementation, and evaluation of PC CDS. 

To explore the key factors affecting PC CDS throughout its lifecycle, the Patient-Centered CDS Learning Network developed the Analytical Framework for Action (AFA) based on iterative discussions with numerous stakeholders. The AFA has been a valuable framework for the PCCDS Learning Network and the Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative in identifying areas of opportunity and challenge to PC CDS, and a useful tool for informing the discussions related to PC CDS with the diverse stakeholders who are involved in the work of the CDSiC.

The PC CDS AFA identifies key steps in the process of turning knowledge from patient-centered findings into CDS-enabled actions to produce better care and outcomes. The final version of the AFA was approved by the PCCDS Learning Network’s Steering Committee, and includes the defined key factors below:

  • PRIORITIZING: Applying objective measures of evidence for identifying and prioritizing findings that are to be transformed and disseminated via PC CDS, assessing or defining their implementability, and defining stewardship and governance requirements.
  • AUTHORING: Applying accepted data and knowledge standards for translating findings into one or more PC CDS intervention types that support key decisions, actions, and communications that are essential to ensuring that the finding improves care and outcomes.
  • IMPLEMENTING: Applying standardized, best practice methods and architectures for operationalizing PC CDS interventions into clinical workflows that deliver the right information to the right user in the right format through the right channel at the right time ("CDS Five Rights").
  • MEASURING: Ensuring that PC CDS interventions measurably improve clinician and patient decision-making, care processes, and outcomes.
  • LEARNING: Aggregating local PC CDS-related outcomes and effectiveness measures to facilitate both local and system-level learning from identified gaps in PCOR knowledge, and lessons learned from authoring, implementing, and using PC CDS in clinical practice to enhance care and outcomes.
  • EXTERNAL FACTORS: External factors including the marketplace, policy, legal, and governance issues that impact development, dissemination, and implementation processes for PC CDS.