NYSDA Publications

AHRQ Issues CDSiC Newsletter

Sep 12, 2025

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has issued its Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative (CDSiC) newsletter.

Issue Number 33 | September 12, 2025
As the AHRQ CDSiC draws to a close in September 2025, we celebrate four years of innovation, partnership, and impact—work that has shaped the landscape of patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS) and will help to empower patients for years to come.  Below, we share some of the project's final resources, featuring the AHRQ CDSiC's findings on critical PC CDS topics: measurement, standardization, and effective implementation. 
Stay tuned for a follow-up newsletter that will share an overview of the cutting-edge work that's been completed by the AHRQ CDSiC since its launch and highlight ways to access our work moving forward.
Table of Contents:
Despite the strong link between patient experience and healthcare quality, few existing measures capture patients' experiences with PC CDS.  There is also no nationally representative survey data related to the use of PC CDS, limiting the understanding of the current state of PC CDS in the U.S.  To help address these challenges, the AHRQ CDSiC created a new report that identifies key domains which can be used to measure patient experience with PC CDS and provides a bank of 41 patient-informed survey questions that support measurement in this key area.  The survey questions include:

  • Screening questions that help to understand the respondent's use of PC CDS
  • Questions that probe patient experience with PC CDS, corresponding to high-priority domains such as self-management support and shared decision making
  • Questions on patients' willingness to try PC CDS or artificial intelligence-supported healthcare tools in the future
Access the report here!
Override reasons are provided by clinicians, patients, or caregivers when declining PC CDS recommendations.  While this data provides insights that can be used to improve PC CDS functionality, override reasons often vary in the terminology used across systems, limiting its analysis.  The AHRQ CDSiC previously explored this important topic through the development of a Taxonomy of Override Reasons.  It has now built upon this foundational work to further support the standardization of PC CDS override reasons.  In a new report, the AHRQ CDSiC presents example override reasons to improve consistency across PC CDS and explores strategies to advance the implementation of the taxonomy in PC CDS systems.  The report also highlights five directions for future efforts to improve the override taxonomy and facilitate its implementation.  Access this resource here!
Text message-facilitated PC CDS holds promise as an efficient, cost-effective way to reach patients across a range of clinical interactions.  To advance this cutting-edge method of engaging patients in decision making, the AHRQ CDSiC produced a report that shares practical guidance for its implementation.  The report highlights promising practices that PC CDS implementers and healthcare organizations can adopt to further encourage patient engagement, from involving patients in co-design to supporting bidirectional communication with patients.  By leveraging the strategies included in the report, stakeholders can encourage organizational and system-wide shifts to create supportive environments that can facilitate the scaling of text message-facilitated PC CDS.  Read the full report here!
PC CDS tools can be used to collect data from patients and provide timely information that informs healthcare decision making.  Yet collecting patient-provided data can create burdens for respondents, which may lead to decreased response rates, reduced data accuracy, and a negative impact on the patient-clinician relationship.  As these digital health technologies evolve, it is essential to design data collection methods that are practical, patient-centered, and sustainable.  The AHRQ CDSiC has produced a report that explores this critical topic in depth.  The report identifies 13 contributors to and 16 mitigation strategies for respondent burden related to patient-facing PC CDS.  Multiple stakeholders, from PC CDS developers to clinicians, can use this report to reduce patient burden when collecting data via digital tools by applying mitigation strategies and designing sustainable, patient-centered approaches.  Read the full report here!
 
The Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative (CDSiC) is a community of broad, diverse stakeholders at the forefront of using technology to better support care teams, patients, and caregivers.  The CDSiC is working toward healthcare decisions that are driven by both patient-centered and patient-specific information and that align with patient needs, preferences, and values.  The CDSiC is funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) as part of a multi-component initiative to help advance patient-centered outcomes research into practice through CDS.  For any inquiries regarding the CDSiC you may contact the project team at CDSiC@norc.org.