The ABCs for deciding on a decision support system in the health care industry.

As the information superhighway becomes clustered with various organizations sharing the hope of staying solvent with the aid of technology, managers in the health care industry are more and more looking to efficient Decision Support Systems (DSS). The focus of DSS selection has often been on evaluations that measure decision performance for determining the influence and efficacy of the tool. Such evaluations, in many instances, ignore pertinent measurements for a successful selection and implementation of a DSS. In this article, the authors present a simple but important set of evaluation factors that can "make or break" a DSS implementation in the health care industry.