Home · Glossary · Clinical Decision Support (CDS)
Enterprise AI glossary · Compliance & Regulation

Clinical Decision Support (CDS)

AI systems that recommend clinical actions to physicians — automatically Annex III high-risk under the EU AI Act and increasingly regulated by the FDA and MHRA as software-as-a-medical-device.

Definition

What Clinical Decision Support (CDS) means in practice

Clinical Decision Support systems recommend clinical actions to physicians: diagnostic suggestions, treatment options, medication-interaction warnings, risk stratification. The regulatory posture in 2026 is converging: the EU AI Act classifies CDS as Annex III high-risk; the FDA's Software-as-a-Medical-Device guidance increasingly catches LLM-driven CDS; the UK MHRA has signalled similar treatment under the Medical Device Regulations. The engineering implications are substantial: every recommendation must be explainable, the underlying model lifecycle artefacts must be captured for regulator review, and the physician's authority to override must be preserved with full audit. MindMap's clinical-coding-assist and clinical-pathway-recommendation deployments at NHS and US healthcare customers are architected for this regime.

Go deeper
EU AI Act compliance architecture →
Free download · 12-minute read

The Sovereign AI Playbook.

Enterprise generative AI that runs on your servers.

  • 01Definition. The four non-negotiable properties of a sovereign deployment — and the three patterns that look sovereign but aren't.
  • 02Why now. Three forces that converged in 2026: regulator pressure, the open-weights capability gap closing, and unit economics flipping.
  • 03Reference architecture. The five-layer stack we deploy: applications → agent runtime → sovereign LLM → RAG + KB → data stores. With model and tooling choices for each.
  • 04The regulators. SAMA · RBI · UK ICO · EU AI Act · DPDP · HIPAA — what each requires and how it maps to architecture.
Get the playbook
Free PDF, in your inbox in 30 seconds.
We'll send the PDF, and may follow up once or twice with related material. One click unsubscribes.

All 62 terms, in plain language

Sovereign AI, RAG, agentic AI, IDP, MLOps and the regulations that shape enterprise AI.

Browse the glossary →Talk to an engineer →