Governance

Once you have approval to proceed to develop your decision support tool, you need to establish the governance structure to oversee the design and development process. The governance role includes:

• Managing risks and resources
• Ensuring that the development process will deliver the agreed benefits
• Prioritising tasks and making compromises when required
• Reporting through the appropriate higher-level governance route within the organisation, to ensure that there is organisational oversight of the development.

Key roles

Alongside defining the governance arrangements, you should establish your delivery team, with key roles and responsibilities. The same individual may hold more than one role. Such roles may include:

Lead clinician(s)/practitioner(s)/manager(s) - lead representative and contact point for the primary end-user group.

Product owner - key point of liaison between the lead clinician and the knowledge manager or technical development team. Responsible for understanding user needs, translating these needs into specific development requirements, and prioritising these requirements in line with available time and resource.

This role may be held locally within your own organisation, or you may seek support from the national Right Decision Service team.

Knowledge management support – for decision support tools that use the Right Decisions Platform to translate guidance and other information into decision-ready formats, knowledge managers play a key role. They define the toolkit navigation, structure and segment the information for easy access, optimise search and browse functionality, and make best use of the RDP capabilities such as visual pathways, question and answer pathways, risk stratification tools, interactive forms etc.

This role may be held locally within your own organisation, or you may seek support from the national Right Decision Service team.

Data analytics support – if your decision support tool is to be based on new analysis of datasets, you will need to identify data analytics expertise.

Content authors, reviewers. If you are delivering knowledge-based decision support based on guidance or other information developed within your organisation, you will need to identify authors and define the approval and review process, including:

• Review and sign-off of content at the time of initial publication
• Review and approval of initial delivery of the content when embedded in the Right Decision Service platform
• Approving updates to the content after initial publication
• Scheduled review date(s) for content
• Coordinating scheduled review and approval of content

Technical support – The Right Decision Service platform provides a suite of ready-made tools for creating computerised knowledge as the basis for decision support, without requiring technical input. If you require additional functionality beyond the scope of this existing suite, you should contact the Right Decision Service team to discuss requirements and any associated costs. The Right Decision Service team has a contract with a software development company to support new technical developments.