  The aim of a clinical decision support tool is to reduce the complexity of
clinical decisions. However, when decision support tools are poorly implemented
they may actually confuse physicians and complicate clinical care. This paper
argues that information from decision support tools is often removed from the
clinical context of the targeted decisions. Physicians largely depend on
clinical context to handle the complexity of their day-to-day decisions.
Clinical context enables them to take into account all ambiguous information
and patient preferences. Decision support tools that provide analytic
information to physicians, without its context, may then complicate the
decision process of physicians. It is likely that the joint forces of
physicians and technology will produce better decisions than either of them
exclusively: after all, they do have different ways of dealing with the
complexity of a decision and are thus complementary. Therefore, the future
challenges of decision support do not only reside in the optimization of the
predictive value of the underlying models and algorithms, but equally in the
effective communication of information and its context to doctors.
