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This user guide provides information about how to complete the Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support Planning and Reporting Tool.
Developed by the AHRQ Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative’s Measurement and Outcomes Workgroup, this user guide supports patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS) researchers in consistently and comprehensively describing how PC CDS was designed, developed, deployed, used, maintained, and evaluated.
Details relevant to the patient-centered activities that are critical components of PC CDS, such as patient needs elicitation, patient co-design, incorporation of patient generated health data (PGHD), and involvement of patients as key implementation stakeholders, are currently missing from existing CDS implementation guides and frameworks. While incorporation of these activities in CDS implementation is still emerging, this user guide provides preliminary guidance on reporting them. This guidance provides information about how to complete the PC CDS Planning and Reporting Tool.
About the User Guide
The tool and user guide aggregate guidance from a range of existing CDS implementation guidance, and implementation science and evaluation frameworks, to provide a unified resource for reporting PC CDS research. It supports PC CDS researchers in describing PC CDS along four key sections: 1) planning and needs assessment; 2) design and development; 3) implementation and adoption; and 4) evaluation, maintenance, and sustainability.
This user guide accompanies a fillable tool (the PC CDS Planning and Reporting Tool) that enables users to describe details of how each section was addressed within their PC CDS approach. In doing so, the tool:
- Allows users to document (or address) the "why, what, and how" details for their PC CDS implementation.
- Ensures that the key dimensions that drive PC CDS success are described in a complete and consistent way. This will provide a more consistent and transparent context for related process and outcome measurement within and across PC CDS evaluation efforts.
- Promotes patient-centeredness within the CDS lifecycle to help shift the field from CDS to PC CDS.
The user guide describes how to use the PC CDS Planning & Reporting Tool to document how each task and the associated patient-centered activities for their specific PC CDS implementation were addressed. The user guide also describes the PC CDS areas included within the tool. For each section, specific tasks to consider are outlined when reporting on PC CDS implementations. The guide also synthesizes guidance from the literature on what to consider—including example elements to consider—as well as patient-centered activities to prioritize for each task.
How To Use This Guide
The intended users of the user guide and tool include researchers, electronic health record (EHR) and app developers, users and evaluators of PC CDS aimed at improving particular care processes or outcomes, patients and caregivers, and others who are interested in participating in the reporting of PC CDS. Research teams can use this user guide and tool during and after implementation of PC CDS to produce a comprehensive report describing their work. Detailed, comprehensive PC CDS implementation reports can help others replicate implementation successes and contribute richly to efforts to synthesize best practices across implementation efforts.
Suggested Citation: Kukhareva P, Kurtzman RT, Nwefo R, Jiménez F, Ozkaynak M, Desai PJ, Dullabh PM, and the CDSiC Measurement and Outcomes Workgroup. Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support Planning and Reporting Tool User Guide. Prepared under Contract No. 75Q80120D00018. AHRQ Publication No. 24-0069-8-EF. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; September 2024.
