Journal of

Background: Despite the fact that only one-third of chest pains occur due to heart diseases, still physicians have tendency to admit most of these patients to reduce risk of negligence and its consequences.Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) enable physicians to distinguish better cardiac from non-cardiac chest pain. This study reviewed articles which focused on this issue.

Materials and Methods: Google scholar and PubMed database were targeted for search. Out of ninety primary matching articles based on the title, abstract and keywords, 28 full texts were relevant which were included in this study.

Results: Included articles were classified into two categories such as managing hospital resources and increasing the accuracy of diagnosis. Study results in the first categoryshowed decrease in both reception and referral time up to 30% and length of hospital stay up to 26% using CDSS. In the second category, the highest reported accuracy of diagnosis was 97% and the maximum sensitivity and specificity were 100% and 89.43% respectively. Even though, the results of a study revealed that the accuracy of decision support system in diagnosing cardiac chest pain was better than the compared cardiologists.

Conclusion: Considering the role of CDSS in managing hospital resources and improving accuracy of diagnosing cardiac chest pain, it is suggested that emergency wards and cardiac screening centers equipped by these systems.