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cds-hooks/docs
CDS Hooks website & specification
CDS Hooks is an HL7 standard for wiring clinical decision support into EHR workflows — when a clinician books an appointment or signs an order, your CDS service gets called and can return cards with advice or SMART app links. This repo is the spec itself, published as a MkDocs site. Audience is EHR vendors, health IT integrators, and anyone building CDS services that plug into Epic, Cerner, or similar systems.
The spec is well-structured with hook-specific docs for every major clinical workflow (order-sign, patient-view, encounter-discharge, etc.), which makes it usable as a reference while you're implementing. The security considerations doc and the included risk assessment PDF show the standard has been through actual threat modeling, not just protocol design. Being HL7-balloted and vendor-agnostic means implementations in Epic and Cerner actually interoperate, which is rare in health IT. The SMART on FHIR integration story is clean — cards can launch context-aware SMART apps without separate auth handshakes.
The repo still references Travis CI (dead badge, likely broken pipeline) while the actual publish workflow is in GitHub Actions — the README is just stale. Python 2.7 is listed as a requirement, which is end-of-life and a red flag if anyone actually tries to follow the setup instructions. The spec versioning story is weak: there's a changelog and a `current.md` but no clear machine-readable way to know what version a CDS service or EHR claims to support. For a standard this mature (the cheat sheet PDF is from 2019), the examples directory is thin — a working reference implementation would do more for adoption than another PDF.