Making Clinical Decision Support Valuable

Pediatric dosing is a complicated affair. With the increasing trend of childhood obesity in the United States, the risks of ordering and administering improper doses also increases. Additionally there are the complicating factors of physiological development - pediatric patients cannot be dosed as "little adults."  There are a number of well regarded pediatric drug reference books available, however when choosing one of these resources it is important to understand the publisher's editorial model.  Do they have pediatric specialists as authors and editors? How frequently is the information reviewed and updated?  Does it contain easy to read pediatric dosing charts that can be highly useful in reviewing medications across a drug class?

Additionally, there is an emerging approach to pediatric dosing through the use of drug content, both referential and transactional data.   Pediatric dose range checking functionality can be associated with content used to support electronic medical records. The advantage to this publishing model is the frequency with which updates can be made - rather than waiting for the next edition of a reference to be printed,  the on-line products can be updated at any time. However the same questions should be considered with an electronic format of information: who are the authors and how frequently is the body of content reviewed? Special care should be taken when choosing any source of information for pediatric dosing.