A Clinical Decision Support System for Increasing Compliance with Protocols in Chemotherapy of Children with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

OBJECTIVE: In this survey, a protocol-based Chemotherapy Prescription Decision Support System (CPDSS) was designed and evaluated to reduce medication errors in the chemotherapy process of children with ALL. METHODS: The CPDSS algorithm was extracted by the software development team based on the protocol used by doctors to treat children with ALL. The ASP.Net MVC and SQL Server 2016 programming languages were used to develop the system. A 3-step evaluation (technical, retrospective, and user satisfaction) was performed on CPDSS designed at 2 children’s hospitals in Tehran. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. At the technical evaluation step, users provided recommendations included in the system. RESULTS: In the retrospective CPDSS evaluation step, 1281 prescribed doses of the drugs related to 30 patients were entered into the system. CPDSS detected 735 cases of protocol deviations and 57 (95%, CI = 1.25-2.55) errors in prescribed chemotherapy for children with ALL. In the user satisfaction evaluation, the users approved two dimensions of the user interface and functionality of the system. CONCLUSIONS: With the provision of alerts, the CPDSS can help increase compliance with chemotherapy protocols and decrease the chemotherapy prescribing errors that can improve patient safety.