Decision support in medical practice: a physician's perspective,

摘要

Abstract: A physician's decision support system consists of three components: (1) a comprehensive patient record and medical knowledge database, (2) information infrastructure for data storage, transfer, and (3) an analytical inference engine, accompanied by business operation database. Medical knowledge database provides the guideline for the selection of powerful clinical features or tests to be observed so that an accurate diagnosis as well as effective treatment can be quickly reached. With a tremendous amount of information stored in multiple data centers, it takes an effective information infrastructure to provide streamlined flow of information to the physician in a timely fashion. A real-time analytical inference engine mimics the physician's reasoning process. However due to incomplete, imperfect data and medical knowledge, a realistic output from this engine will be a list of options with associated confidence level, expected risk, so that the physician can make a well-informed final decision. Physicians are challenged to pursue the objective of ensuring an acceptable quality of care in an economically restrained environment. Therefore, business operation data have to be factored into the calculation of overall loss. Follow-up of diagnosis and treatment provides retrospective assessment of the accuracy and effectiveness of the existing inference engine. !22