ABSTRACT
The positive role of clinical decision support systems based on clinical guidelines in reducing medical errors and improving patient outcomes has been widely recognized. However, the knowledge in clinical guidelines is usually hard-coded into clinical decision support systems, making it difficult for these systems to adapt to the rapid changes of clinical guidelines. Knowledge being hard-coded into the system also means that the system is a black box, and doctors cannot understand the decision-making logic behind the system. These reasons make it difficult for clinical decision support systems to be applied on a large scale. This paper proposes a flexible clinical decision support model, which contains two key parts, namely the knowledge authoring environment and the knowledge execution environment. The transition of knowledge from hard-coded to flexible editing is illustrated in the COVID-19 case. This flexible method will be applied to more complex clinical problems in the future. © 2021 IEEE.