Nov 27, 2025
CDS in Practical Patient Care: Success Factors and Barriers
Under the guiding theme “CDS in Practical Patient Care – What Works and What Fails?”, the CDSN Symposium 2025 took place on November 17–18 in Leipzig. The event was organized by the Clinical Decision Support Network (CDSN) and focused on the current challenges and potentials of clinical decision support systems (CDSS).
In many research projects, CDSS initially emerge as demonstrators. However, the transition into real-world clinical care often occurs only with delay or not at all – a problem known in the professional community as “The Chasm”, the gap between prototype and practical application.
One of the symposium contributions came from our team led by Katja Hoffmann at the Dresden site (Technical University of Dresden | University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus Dresden). She presented a user-centered dashboard for therapy planning in diabetic macular edema, developed within the MiHUBx project in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Kathrin Engelmann, Gabriel Stolze, Jayden Maurice Tannenhauer (Klinikum Chemnitz gGmbH), Sophia Grummt, and Hamed Mishian.
Another focus of the symposium was the interactive discussion on implementing CDSS into everyday clinical practice. Experts from various disciplines highlighted typical barriers and shared insights into successful implementation strategies.
Particular importance was attached to the following factors:
- Consistent change management
- Close involvement of end-users in development and implementation
- Continuous validation of AI-based models
- Context-sensitive and patient-relevant decision support
- Technical, syntactic, and semantic interoperability as a fundamental prerequisite
The symposium clearly demonstrated that successfully transferring CDSS from the development environment into clinical care requires close collaboration between development teams, medical staff, hospital management, and quality management.
Further information about the event and the network is available at:https://cds-network.eu/