Creating Knowledge-Based Clinical Decision Support System Using Cloud Computing Architecture

Healthcare is an immensely knowledge-based community where real-time collection, analysis, and sharing of data are essential part of the clinical workflow. The information and knowledge generated from this data are crucial for patient treatment and become an asset to the facility when stored and enriched. The Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is a critical component in the healthcare delivery system that holds the potential to improve the quality of the service at the point of care. This indicates the need for managing the knowledge base to support and improve the quality of care provided. Up-to-date medical guidelines and decision rules guided by the latest evidence-based medical outcomes are required for effective use of such CDS. The current methods and processes used for assimilating the clinicians' expertise or extracting the knowledge from research and medical outcomes are not efficient enough to keep up with the pace of change and emerging trends in the healthcare industry. In addition, the medical outcomes are fragmented and they are not available as a collective resource to create an efficient CDS system.;The information technology (IT) that revolutionized the process of healthcare delivery has provided the some best solutions to the information demands of healthcare. A knowledge-based CDS needs latest technologies to process the enormous amount of data and timely suggestions required for decision-making. This research analyzes the current issues in knowledge-based CDS and envisions the possibility of such a system that could be managed through a centralized infrastructure benefiting the entire medical fraternity. The objective is to present framework using an emerging computing architecture-cloud computing, which could be a viable solution for developing and using the knowledge-based CDS system in the future.