The Role of Spreadsheets in Clinical Decision Support: A Survey of the Medical Algorithms Company User Community

TL;DR

This survey explores how clinical professionals use spreadsheets within CDSS, revealing their role in operational, research, and reference tasks, and highlighting the integration of spreadsheets with database systems.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the practical use of spreadsheets in CDSS and compares these findings with other studies to enhance understanding of their clinical impact.

Findings

Spreadsheets are used for logic development in CDSS.

CDSS are employed in diverse clinical settings.

Spreadsheets serve as a bridge between logic design and database implementation.

Abstract

This paper presents and discusses the results of a small scoping survey of Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) users from the Medical Algorithms Company website which hosts 24,000 different CDSS. These results are analysed, discussed, and compared with other similar studies and contribute to the wider understanding of how CDSS impact on clinical practice. The results show that CDSS provided by Medal are being used by clinical professionals in a variety of settings, both as an operational tool and as a research and reference tool. Whilst these tools are implemented and executed in a database, the initial logic is worked out on a spreadsheet. The paper describes that process and examines some of the results of the survey.