Electronic Medical Records: From Clinical Decision Support to Precision Medicine
February 24, 2012
This is a presentation I gave to the Dutch delegation to HIMSS. It reflects much of my current thinking about current and future trends in health IT.
Electronic Medical Records: From Clinical Decision Support to Precision Medicine
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Amen to Andrew! Healthcare can never be entirely based on algorithms or automated decision support systems, until the disease processes themselves can be standardized. However, the best physican is the one who can explain to the rest of the treatment team the different route that should be taken for a particular patient’s care when that “gut feeling” says the usual path is not the best way to go. The best clinical support decision system will include a rapid, robust capability to capture those “gut feelings” and incorporate them into the treatment model. Too much of Health IT is based on the assumption that we won’t have to update the application once it’s passed Beta testing.
If a large dataset of clinical support decision rules were to be constructed, then alot of mistakes could potentially be avoided. My only concern with that is you’re turning healthcare into a machine and you loose the personal touch and experience that a seasoned physician brings to the patient. Sometimes that “gut” feeling about what something is can save the patients life, where as if the physician followed the recommended path of treatment, or tests, the patient may not have made it the whole way through before the real issue was found.