Kevin C S Liang wrote: ...clip... > -main product is MedWorks : a software system to help doctors > tread/diagnose patients. the article is a bit vague about this, but I > assume that it also covers patient management. Apparently, the program > can suggest courses of action based on input from an MD. > Diagnosis: In general, diagnosis-assistance software is not very helpful clinically for a number of reasons, chiefly that it's extremely tedious to collect and enter all the little scraps of data the software wants; and in the end, it does little more than suggest the same differential diagnosis one could find in 60 seconds by grabbing a textbook off the shelf. Treatment: Dr. Dave Pepper has developed a nice module for asthma managment that writes the doctor's progress note in sensible English as eval/treatment choices are made, and causes the doc to follow currently recommended protocols. This technique is very nice, although labor-intensive for the developer; the obvious limitation is how to extend this to the corpus of medical practice, most of which is not defined as exactly as the management of asthma. One will obviously be limited to the most common and best studied chronic conditions, so this sort of thing will always be a suppplementary tool, not the center of the documentation process. A third possibility for such software is in quality assurance, to ensure that clinicians are reminded about QA protocols that are currently in fad. Dan Johnson md
