Explanations in Clinical DSS: A Review and Research Agenda

Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are increasingly being developed to assist users in making complex decisions in the healthcare domain. However, there are many failures of CDSS adoption, and lack of explanation is seen as hindering adoption of these systems by medical professionals. Yet there is limited understanding of the cumulative research on the role of explanations in CDSS. Motivated thus, this study conducts a literature review on the role of explanations in CDSS to examine the current state of research, identify gaps, and outline future research directions. Our key findings are that there are limited studies about the role of explanation in CDSS adoption, their usefulness, and impacts, with a lack of theoretical understanding of the phenomenon. Additionally, more research is needed to examine the role of explanations in CDSS for a larger range of diseases and clinical tasks, as well as to investigate how explanations can be personalized