Fetal growth and birth weight: the need for clinical decision support software

Health Information Systems (HIS) are growing. Their role is to both facilitate the processing of an ever increasing amount of health related information and to optimize workflows, in order to provide better care. This last characteristic, arguably the most important, is often neglected by lack of planning and communication with the professionals involved in the process being changed by the HIS or its component implementation. The software must be able to better provide a (correct) task, but also to respond to healthcare professional's needs and expectations. Fetal growth and birth weight is often used to classify pregnancy or new born risk, because its extremes are often associated with pathological conditions. This classification is difficult, and multiple reference tables were created for this purpose. Several tools may be provided by software to alleviate correct risk classification, reference creation and validation. We provide a rationale to the creation of such clinical decision support software, arguably the most important step for health related software acceptance and success.