I.J. Information Technology and Computer Science, 2016, 8, 23-30 Published Online August 2016 in MECS (http://www.mecs-press.org/) DOI: 10.5815/ijitcs.2016.08.03 Copyright © 2016 MECS I.J. Information Technology and Computer Science, 2016, 8, 23-30 The Implementation of Clinical Decision Support System: A Case Study in Saudi Arabia Sahar S. Alqahtani, Sabah Alshahri, Ahood I. Almaleh, Farrukh Nadeem Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. E-mail: salqahtani0311@stu.kau.edu.sa, sama.alsabah123456@hotmail.com, aaaaa1591@hotmail.com, fabdullatif@kau.edu.sa Abstract —In recent years, the healthcare sector has shown inclination towards restructuring of healthcare systems to harmonize with technological innovations and adopting decision support system in routine clinical practices. The objective of this paper is to summarize challenges of Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) and focus on the effectiveness of CDSS to improve clinical practice. This paper also describes the experience of CDSS in healthcare sector in Saudi Arabia and addresses the requirements for implementing successful CDSS with a real example. This study concludes that healthcare sector is in dire need to increase quality of patients‘ care and improve clinical practices by adopting CDSS. Index Terms—CDSS in Saudi Arabia, the effectiveness of CDSS, challenges in CDSS, CDSS implementation. I. INTRODUCTION The health sector personnel including administration, physicians, nurses, and pharmacists rely heavily on patients‘ medical information. They consider it as a treasure to improve patients‘ healthcare and rapidly adapted to the latest technological tools that support patients‘ information storage and processing. The healthcare information systems support the healthcare environment to address the issues regarding the quality and cost of care. Decision Support System (DSS) has been a part of healthcare information system for a long time. However, it supported only the financial or administrative domain. It has recently entered the domain of clinical data and clinical decision support system (CDSS) has emerged. The early CDSS is an extended form of previous expert system, where the goal is to create computer programs to simulate the human thinking by using machine-learning techniques. The machine learning is a class of computer algorithms that have the ability to understand human patterns of actions and intelligently use them to make decisions or forecast the future. The machine learning algorithms heavily rely on the available data from previous observations, which include information provided by the physician, staff, pharmacy and other healthcare individuals [1]. The health record entered electronically or registered manually by the clinicians is intelligently refined and presented to CDSS to enhance the quality of care in real time. The use of CDSS is rising in healthcare sector, especially in the organizations that suffer from problems with healthcare quality. The problems in healthcare quality are mainly due to the errors caused by human inattention and dangerous interaction between the treatments. CDSS can be effectively used to minimize such errors and enhance the patient‘s care quality. The healthcare in Saudi Arabia has been significantly supported by the Saudi Government. Over the past few years, a rapid progress has been observed in the field of quality of care by the implementation of powerful CDSS techniques used in developed countries. In this paper, we briefly present different types of CDSS and the impact of CDSS in healthcare. We also summarize the challenges in implementation of CDSS. Then, we describe the requirements for successful implementation of CDSS. We also describe the use of CDSS in Saudi health sector. Further, we discuss the role of Saudi Ministry of Health in addressing healthcare issues in Saudi Arabia. Finally, we present literature survey of CDSS. This paper organized as follows. Section II describes the related work. In Section III, we present different types of CDSS, followed by the impact of CDSS in healthcare in Section IV. We e xp lain ma jor challenges in implementation of CDSS in Section V. We describe main requirements for successful implementation of CDSS in Section VI. Section VII presents how CDSS is implemented in Saudi Arabia and the role of Ministry of Health to improve the clinical practices in Saudi Arabia. Finally, we conclude in Section VIII. II. RELATED WORK Many published studies discuss the CDSS effectiveness. The system and the diagnostic programs alert clinicians about the dangerous interactions of drugs. These programs can minimize the problems and errors, prevent complications and thus improve the clinician s‘ diagnoses. Early warning on the occurrence of damage may affect the quality of care and the cost involved [18, 19, 20, 48]. According to a study in England, the researchers found that implementing the computer-based guidelines can bring about a change in the health outcomes and the unanswered questions faced by the