Clinical Decision Support and Beyond (Third Edition) Progress and Opportunities in Knowledge-Enhanced Health and Healthcare

Health equity is critical to delivering effective care. However, marginalized populations have faced persistent health disparities and barriers to their care. Health information technologies, like clinical decision support (CDS), represent a potential tool to achieve health equity. In this chapter, we will (1) define health disparities and health equity, (2) present how CDS can be a tool for equity, (3) reveal barriers to broader implementation in underserved settings, and (4) highlight future efforts to apply CDS for health inequity, including artificial intelligence. We acknowledge that the application of CDS to address health disparities is an understudied area with great potential.