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Owned by Samuel Nicolary
Last updated: Aug 07, 2014 by Michael J. Suralik
2 min read

The creation of the CDS Framework was initiated by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bureau of Immunization, Citywide Immunization Registry (CIR) when it launched a project in 2011 to replace their existing immunization clinical decision support system with a new system, called the Immunization Calculation Engine (Home). HLN Consulting, LLC, which has been the CIR's provider of Health IT consulting services since 2000, researched technologies that could be leveraged for this effort and selected OpenCDS as a toolkit and a platform for implementing ICE. The CIR invited the Alabama Department of Public Health to join the CIR and HLN in a subject matter expert (SME) workgroup to specify and document the clinical decision support rules for ICE. HLN software developers then implemented the documented ICE rules within OpenCDS.  

One of CIR's requirements for their new ICE software system was a web-based application that would enable subject matter experts who are not developers to manage ICE. It was recognized that organizations that implement decision support services for other clinical domains could also benefit from web-based tools. Therefore, HLN developed a software framework (the CDS Framework) that any organization may utilize to manage ICE or other clinical decision support services. The CDS Framework was architected with a graphical user interface layer called the /wiki/spaces/CAT/overview and a business logic and data access layer called the Middle Tier Services (MTS). The functionality was organized into /wiki/spaces/CAT/pages/15007788 components so that users of the CDS Framework may deploy whichever plugins meet their functional needs, and so that third parties could develop additional plugins that could easily be added to the framework.

On March 31, 2014, the CIR released the entire CDS Framework (including ICE) under a standard open-source license (LGPL v3) and made the source code available for download from this site.

HLN also utilized the CDS Framework to create a template-driven CDA editor and Test Manager for the Decision Support for Data Segmentation (DS2) project, part of Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS).  SHARPS is a multi-institutional and multidisciplinary research project supported by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. The SHARPS DS2 components were released under an open source BSD license. 

Original Contributors

The organizations listed below contributed to the development of CDS Framework. Other interested organizations and individuals are welcome and encouraged to contribute to the ongoing development of the CDS Framework.