Matchmerge Decision Support v11 (MDS)

Matchmerge Decision Support v11 (MDS v11)

Continuing our practice of innovation, we rewrote Matchmerge Decision Support as MDS v11 from the ground-up when CDC first published its “Clinical Decision Support for immunizations” (CDSi). CDSi represents a much more computable expression of CDC-recommended immunization best practices than did previous, verbal recommendations. It includes configuration parameters (“Supporting Data”) and formal business rules (“Logic Specification”) for over two dozen vaccine-preventable diseases (“antigens”) and over 100 schedules of multi-dose protocols of particular vaccine product (“series”).

Permutations of these hundreds of series, multiplied by the number of vaccine products on the market, person demographics (age, gender, etc.), and patient history and conditions (when they received past vaccines, their contraindications, if any, etc.) produce an astronomical number of special cases that the decision support service must be able to consider. The “rules-based” approach found in nearly every other immunization registry cannot possibly account for all these cases, because it is practically impossible to write rules to cover all of them. As a result, as new person-histories present themselves, rules-based approaches often produce the wrong recommendation. They constantly have to be updated to account for new cases that present. Wrong recommendations are often not even identified.

MDS v11, by contrast, leverages a completely novel computational approach which correctly handles all cases according to the rules CDC supplies in CDSi. Here’s how MDS v11 compares with rules-based approaches: