Computer Support for Protocol-Directed Therapy. Abstract, Executive Summary andFinal Report

摘要

Our research has addressed the automation of protocol-based care for clinicaltrials. We have developed a computer-based patient record system known as T-HELPER I that allows health-care workers (1) to enter and review clinical data required for the care of people who have AIDS and HIV infection and (2) to browse through textual protocol documents online. A more advanced system, T-Helper II, adds to the functionality available in T-HELPER I situation-specific clinical advice regarding patients' potential eligibility for clinical trails and the therapy that patients should receive when they are already participating in clinical trials. Much of our work has involved developing the computational methods required by T-HELPER II to automate aspects of protocol-based care. For example, we have developed novel approaches to reasoning about protocol-directed therapy abd about determining eligibility for new protocols. We currently are evaluating our system in a controlled trial at a county-operated AIDS clinic. Our experiment is designed to measure whether the additional functionality of the T-HELPER II system leads to enhanced accural of patients to clinical trials and to changes in the attitudes of health-care workers regarding computer-based decision-support systems.