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HL7 Decision Support Service (DSS), Release 1

DESCRIPTION

A Decision Support Service (DSS) facilitates the delivery of clinical decision support by receiving patient data as the input and returning patient-specific conclusions as the output. The HL7 DSS specification provides a standard interface for the provision and consumption of such services. A DSS, for example, can evaluate a patients health summary as encoded in an HL7 Version 3 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA^®) Continuity of Care Document (CCD^®) and provide structured recommendations regarding the patients health maintenance and chronic disease management needs.

TARGETS

• Hospitals and healthcare organizations utilizing decision support systems
• Clinical decision support system vendors
• Clinical decision support knowledge providers (e.g., medical content vendors)
• Clinical decision support knowledge consumers (e.g., EHR system vendors).

BENEFITS

• Facilitates cost-effective implementation of clinical decision support capabilities
• Promotes interoperability
• Helps clearly define expectations of how decision support services should interface with health information systems
• Enables an interoperable marketplace of clinical decision support knowledge resources that can be accessed through a standard software interface

IMPLEMENTATIONS/CASE STUDIES

• Open-source implementation available through the multi-institutional OpenCDS effort (www.opencds.org).

DEVELOPMENT BACKGROUND

The Decision Support Service (DSS) effort was initiated in 2005 as a part of the HL7-OMG Healthcare Services Specification Project (http://hssp.wikispaces.com/). Adopted as an HL7 DSTU in 2006, as an OMG draft standard in 2009, and as an OMG normative standard in 2010, it became an HL7 normative standard in 2011.

The DSS standard defines the collective set of behaviors that one would expect a clinical decision support engine to perform. This functionality is required of most healthcare organizations and allows for the data collected in electronic health records and other clinical information systems to provide enhanced value for patients, clinicians, healthcare providers and payers. The challenge is that the lack of a standard makes the use of decision support services more costly and difficult.

The DSS standard is among the first healthcare standards specifically designed to support a service-oriented architecture (SOA), and it establishes a basis for collaboration with the Object Management Group (OMG). One key point to note is that the DSS standard provides a service interface specification, not the specification of a service implementation. This is a critical distinction in terms of SOA. There could be many different ways of implementing all or part of the functionality to support the behavior described in this specification.

RESPONSIBLE WORK GROUP

RELATED DOCUMENTS

HL7 Decision Support Service (DSS), Release 1

(Download) (3.00 MB)

DSTU DOCUMENTS

HL7 Version 3: Decision Support Service (DSS), Release 1

Expiration Apr 2011

(Download) (3.82 MB)

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

The standard is also available as part of the Health Level Seven Version 3 (V3) Normative Edition. See the HL7 Version 3 Product Suite for downloads.