What fundamental challenge recognized in the 1960s drove the initial efforts toward CDSS?
The sheer volume of medical knowledge outpacing any single physician's capacity to retain it
The foundational impetus for the invention of Clinical Decision Support Systems predates the functional prototypes of the 1970s, resting in the challenges faced by clinicians in the 1960s. The core recognition was that the pace of medical discovery and publication was accelerating to a point where it was practically impossible for any single physician to assimilate and retain the entirety of the evidence-based findings relevant to their practice. This created a gap between established scientific literature and routine bedside decisions. The ambition was to use computers capable of complex reasoning to organize, process, and apply this expanding body of knowledge to augment, rather than substitute, the physician's judgment.
