How were the functional CDSS prototypes emerging in the 1970s primarily characterized?
Dependence on extensive sets of "if-then" rules coded by knowledge engineers
The 1970s marked the birth of recognizable, functional Clinical Decision Support Systems prototypes, stemming directly from AI research into expert systems. The defining characteristic of these early systems was their architecture: they operated based on vast, explicitly defined sets of logical conditional statements, commonly known as 'if-then' rules. These rules were laboriously constructed by knowledge engineers who collaborated closely with specialist physicians to capture and codify expert judgment. This rule-based approach was the mechanism for symbolic reasoning but simultaneously represented the major scaling limitation that later systems sought to overcome by moving toward more flexible, evidence-synthesis models.
