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To be successful, patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS) must be designed with patients in mind, accessible where and when providers and patients prefer to receive the support, implemented in a manner that is easy for them to understand, and evaluated using patient-centered outcome measures. PC CDS can accomplish these goals by leveraging information provided by the patient as well as findings from patient-centered outcomes research. Although there is a large body of literature on CDS, comprehensive guidance on reporting how CDS tools were implemented is lacking. This user guide provides a standard approach for comprehensively describing how PC CDS is designed, developed, deployed, used, maintained, and evaluated.

About the User Guide

This user guide aggregates guidance from a range of existing CDS implementation guidance and implementation science and evaluation frameworks to provide a unified resource for planning and reporting PC CDS implementations. It includes details relevant to the patient-centered activities that are critical components of PC CDS across four key implementation domains:

• Planning and Needs Assessment
• Design and Development
• Implementation and Adoption, and
• Evaluation and Impact.

For each subdomain, the guide outlines specific tasks to consider when planning, implementing, or reporting about PC CDS. The guide also synthesizes guidance from the literature on what to consider as well as patient-centered activities to prioritize for each implementation task.

This user guide is accompanied by a fillable checklist (the PC CDS Planning, Implementation, and Reporting Checklist) that enables users to describe details of how each implementation domain was (or will be) addressed within their PC CDS approach.

How to Use the Guide

Implementation teams can use this user guide and accompanying checklist before implementation begins for planning purposes, during implementation to ensure key steps are being addressed, and after implementation to produce a comprehensive report. Such 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: Desai PJ, Osheroff JA, Ryan S, Heaney-Huls K, Jiménez F, McCoy AB, Dullabh PM, and the CDSiC Scaling, Measurement, and Dissemination of CDS Workgroup. Scaling, Measurement, and Dissemination of CDS Workgroup: PC CDS Planning, Implementation, and Reporting User Guide. Prepared under Contract No. 75Q80120D00018. AHRQ Publication No. 23-0066. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; August 2023.