Towards more effective use of decision support in clinical practice: what the guidelines for guidelines don't tell you

The Brisbane Cardiac Consortium Clinical Support Systems Program used multiple strategies in optimising quality of care of patients with either of two cardiac conditions. One of these strategies was the development and active implementation of decision support systems centred on evidence-based, locally agreed clinical practice guidelines. Our experience in undertaking this task highlighted numerous operational challenges for which solutions were difficult to extract from existing published literature. In the present article we provide a methodology grounded in both theory and real-world experience that may assist others in developing and implementing systems of guideline-based decision support.