Outcomes and Objectives Workgroup: Patient-Focused Outcome Measures for Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support

This report offers measures to evaluate patient-centered clinical decision support impact on patient-focused outcomes.

Developed by the AHRQ CDSiC Outcomes and Objectives Workgroup, this report aims to address the extent to which patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS) improves care delivery by identifying relevant outcome measures deemed most important by patients.

September 1, 2023

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Patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS) is CDS designed to support health-related decision making informed by patient-centered factors including patient-centered research, patient-generated data, use of patient-facing tools, or use in shared decision making. Existing evidence on CDS reveals limited use of measures for assessing patient-focused outcomes related to patient engagement, experience, and patient-reported outcomes. This report offers a preliminary review of patient health journey and patient-reported health outcomes relevant to PC CDS, which includes a range of experiences a patient has throughout the course of receiving healthcare, including interactions and engagement with providers and systems, as well as the patient’s experience of living with their health condition(s).

About the Report

This report is based on a scan of peer-reviewed literature and key informant interviews documenting outcome measures for evaluating CDS, which have been organized into two domains: patient health journey outcomes and patient-reported health outcomes. The outcome measures for the patient health journey domain were identified within three subdomains:

Decision Making
Engagement
Care Experience

The subdomains for patient-reported health outcomes include:

General Health
Physical Health
Mental Health
Social Health

How to Use the Report

Evaluating CDS with an eye toward patient-centeredness requires accounting for the effects of PC CDS on patients’ lived experiences of their health journeys and health outcomes important to patients. While not exhaustive, the measures gathered in this report may provide a starting point for studying how PC CDS influences patient-focused outcomes in both research and real-world settings. This work may help researchers, developers, and implementers select measures that are fit-for-purpose in evaluating PC CDS relative to outcomes of import for patients

Suggested Citation: Kuperman G, Nanji K, Cope E, Dullabh PM, Desai PJ, Hoyt S, Catlett M, Weinberg S, and the CDSiC Outcomes and Objectives Workgroup: Integration of Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support Into Shared Decision Making. Prepared under Contract No. 75Q80120D00018. AHRQ Publication No. 23-0086. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; September 2023.