HELP—A program for medical decision-making

✍ Scribed by Homer R. Warner; Charles M. Olmsted; Barry D. Rutherford

• Book ID: 103050367
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1972
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 971 KB
• Volume: 5
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0010-4809
• DOI: 10.1016/0010-4809(72)90007-9

✦ Synopsis

The rapid growth in useful medical knowledge has made it increasingly difficult for a physician to stay abreast of improvements in diagnosis and management of patients with a wide variety of diseases and disease combinations. For example, a general practitioner may admit a patient to a coronary care unit only infrequently and yet be faced with the problem of making decisions regarding this patient during his stay in such a unit. Care of this patient requires him to be aware of many developments perhaps only published in certain specialty journals. The program described in this paper was designed not only to make available to such a physician, through the help of a time-shared computer system, the current data on his patient, but also by storing the logical basis for making decisions from this data, suggest to him decisions when the data from his patient satisfies this logic. This system can only be effective when coupled to a patient-oriented computer-based medical record (I), but on the other hand, by explicitly stating the data requirements for making these decisions, the important contents of the medical record are directly specified.