Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs) assist clinician decision-making processes by providing treatment recommendations based on patient characteristics. However, the implementation and adoption of CDSSs can be challenging due to the complex organisational and social context of health systems, and the unforeseen system updates required in a changing environment. This presentation aims to provide an overview of a project that investigates how best to implement and evaluate a CDSS for suicide helpline services.
A series of workshops and meetings were conducted to collect the requirements for the functional and non-functional design of a CDSS for On the Line Australia. Key stakeholders, including helpline counsellors, helpline service managers and IT managers provided this requirement information. These stakeholders emphasised four key requirements for the CDSS design: 1) automatic collection of caller demographic information, 2) real-time transcription of calls, 3) assistance with caller suicide risk assessment, and 4) provision of location-appropriate referral service recommendations.
The next project phase will be the implementation design of a hypothetical CDSS for a suicide helpline service, based on the above collected requirements. This will involve a stepwise implementation approach, which divides the implementation of the CDSS into three stages; (1) decisions regarding consent and AI governance issues, (2) integration of a voice analysis algorithm to identify suicide risk from caller voice patterns and (3) the building of a chatbot to collect caller demographic information. The stepwise approach provides multiple benefits including mitigation of implementation risk and greater opportunities for stakeholder engagement in the process. The presentation will also describe the design of the co-evaluation process for the hypothetical CDSS designed for a suicide helpline. Overall the presentation will illustrate a novel collaborative approach for CDSS implementation and evaluation, which can assist in reshaping suicide prevention helpline services both nationally and internationally.