A systematic mapping study of decision support systems in health informatics

The act of choosing the correct option among many available alternatives is called decision-making. Many factors should be considered to make the right choice. The decision may or may not be decisive depending on the contrast of the considered factors. When providing healthcare services, it is important to make the correct decisions to ensure providing efficient, low-cost, fast and accurate services. Many factors should be considered to make such decisions, and some have no contrast to make decision making easier. Thus, computer systems are proposed to support the decision making to ensure better service quality. Patient related information and the techniques used to communicate such information are known as Health Informatics. Health Informatics are mandatory for a decision support system designed to support the healthcare service provision related decision.

The rapid development in software engineering and the high availability of computers in every healthcare facility encourages scientists and engineers to build decision support system in health informatics. Those led to a huge number of studies proposed in this field making it hard for future studies to choose the appropriate guidelines for them. Thus, this study provides a systematic mapping for existing studies that can be used as guidelines for future research.