Healthcare CDSS Development Patterns

Patterns for building Clinical Decision Support Systems that integrate into EMR workflows. CDSS modules are patient safety critical — zero tolerance for false negatives.

When to Use

• Implementing drug interaction checking
• Building dose validation engines
• Implementing clinical scoring systems (NEWS2, qSOFA, APACHE, GCS)
• Designing alert systems for abnormal clinical values
• Building medication order entry with safety checks
• Integrating lab result interpretation with clinical context

How It Works

The CDSS engine is a pure function library with zero side effects. Input clinical data, output alerts. This makes it fully testable.

Three primary modules:

1. checkInteractions(newDrug, currentMeds, allergies) — Checks a new drug against current medications and known allergies. Returns severity-sorted InteractionAlert[]. Uses DrugInteractionPair data model.
2. validateDose(drug, dose, route, weight, age, renalFunction) — Validates a prescribed dose against weight-based, age-adjusted, and renal-adjusted rules. Returns DoseValidationResult.
3. calculateNEWS2(vitals) — National Early Warning Score 2 from `N…