Overview
Clinical Reasoning (CR) is ability to represent, encode, and evaluate clinical knowledge so that it can be integrated into clinical systems. In other words, clinical reasoning is the ability to store and run business logic that is relevant to clinical settings. This may be as simple as controlling whether a particular section of an order set appears based on the conditions that a patient has, or it may be as complex as representing the care pathway for a patient with multiple conditions.
The FHIR Clinical Reasoning module specifies a foundational set of FHIR resources and associated operations that allow a FHIR repository to perform clinical reasoning on clinical data. Some use cases include:
There are additional IGs outside the FHIR CR module that define further requirements and behavior for other Clinical Reasoning use cases. Some examples include:
Smile CDR includes support for storing all the Clinical Reasoning resources defined in the FHIR CR module, including Measure, PlanDefinition, ActivityDefinition and so on. Additionally, Smile CDR includes an embedded CQL engine that allows it to process clinical logic encoded in a standard representation.
Smile CDR also includes a Measure engine that can evaluate clinical quality measures. As a premium solution, Smile CDR offers a scalable, distributed Digital Quality Measure engine. See the licensing documentation for more details on enabling this functionality.