Clinical Decision Support System (DiagnosisPro)
What is Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) ?
Clinical decision support system (CDSS) is an interactive Expert system Computer Software, which is designed to assist physicians and other health professionals with decision making tasks, such as determining diagnosis of patient data. A working definition has been proposed by Robert Hayward of the Centre for Health Evidence; "Clinical Decision Support systems link health observations with health knowledge to influence health choices by clinicians for improved health care". These knowledge-based systems through a process of reasoning techniques generate diagnostic and treatment options and care planning.
Background of CDSS
A Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is a system used within a clinical setting to support clinical decision making. Clinical Decision Support Systems are based on evidence based medicine (EBM) to relay the best up to date information available to the physician or doctor. CDSSs are a result of top notch medical research welded with information technology and computer science. CDSSs support healthcare workers in performing everyday functions by assisting in tasks that require the accurate interpretation of data. CDSSs provide evidence based knowledge in the context of patient specific data. The growing popularity of CDSSs is due to the growing evidence supporting the claim that they improve patient safety and quality of care by facilitating the practice of evidence based medicine. A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is regarded as an application of decision support system (DSS) which takes patient data as input and generates patient-specific advice.The use of IT in health care practices is mainly for two purposes: creating and maintaining electronic medical record (EMR) of each patient and integrating those records using computerized decision support systems to generate specific medical advice. CDSS applications in healthcare are regarded as a key element to enhance decision-making in a healthcare environment to improve the quality of medical care delivery and many CDSSs have been shown to improve physician performance. CDSS uses include: (1) alerts and reminders (2) diagnostic assistance (3) therapy critiquing and planning (4) prescribing decision support, information retrieval and image recognition (5) interpretation
Process of CDSS
Types of CDSS
DXplain
With Dxplain the physician enter information normally used for diagnosis like patient history, symptoms, lab values, ECG and radiology results.
Then DXplain will list the possibilities including both common and uncommon diseases. It will indicate the differential diagnosis with a follow up choices to narrow the list of the probabilities.
It also act as database to enable clinicians to search for information for specific diseases (including more than 2200 diseases) and provide literature references and links for each one. This program can also show the possible clinical finding for a given disease and it can also place them in order by the most common one.
It has features to correct spilling and provide synonyms and specific terms suggestions. It can divide the disease list in to common and rare diseases. For each disease, it can provide what called “a list of evidence” which is a list of finding that support the given diagnosis. Some of the optional finding may include additional information to explain like pictures or definitions.
DiagnosisPro
This online web site cover more than for 7,000 disease possibilities and 15,000 findings. It described as an “accurate and time saving differential diagnosis tool that reminds you instantly of diagnostic possibilities and minimizes medical errors.” This website can be browsed by any computer with an internetconnection. It can also be downloaded on PDAs and smartphones like Treo, iPhone, and Blackberry.
GIDEON
GIDEON system supports the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases. This program is diagnosis based on findings like symptoms, signs and lab tests, dermatological profile. The fields of program are tropical and infectious diseases, epidemiology, microbiology and antimicrobial chemotherapy.
Iliad
Iliad is a similar program used for internal medicine diagnosis. It includes about 1500 diagnoses. This system is also used as an educational tool for medical student to enhance their diagnostic skills.
System of DiagnosisPro
Introduction
DiagnosisPro is a free, accurate and time saving differential diagnosis tool that reminds you instantly of diagnostic possibilities and minimizes medical errors. By simply entering one or more findings or conditions, DiagnosisPro instantly generates a hierarchical list of diagnoses from its database of over 11,000 diseases, 30,000 findings, and 300,000 relationships. To explore a medical diagnosis further, you can utilize the valuable Disease Review and Disease Comparison features of DiagnosisPro.
Why DiagnosisPro is the best tool for a medical doctor?
DiagnosisPro is not intended to make the final diagnosis for a medical practitioner; nothing can replace a physician's expertise and experience. However, a medical doctor is expected to not only know the answers to every medical situation learned way back in medical school, but also to be aware of the most recent developments and advancements. DiagnosisPro is simply a powerful reference tool that was designed to quickly remind busy medical practitioners of all of the possibilities and conditions which they might have forgotten or overlooked -- especially in complicated or rare cases that fall outside of their specialties. You can rely on DiagnosisPro because its data is updated regularly. Its database has been compiled by reputable physicians over the past 30 years from more than 90 prestigious medical resources, including Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, Stein Internal Medicine, Cecil Textbook of Medicine, Oxford Textbook of Medicine, The Merck Manual, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The Lancet, and many more. DiagnosisPro is designed to make your practice safer, enhance the quality of care, reduce misdiagnosis and billing errors, and save time -- especially in diagnosing complicated cases. It is the ultimate differential diagnosis tool for a busy physician.
History of Diagnosispro
DiagnosisPro was initially developed by two physicians:
·Dr. Charles Meader, a board-certified internist who developed the disease database for DiagnosisPro ·Dr. Hugo Pribor, a clinical pathologist and co-designer of the first mini-computer hospital-based laboratory information system
Ever since graduating from the Boston University School of Medicine in 1962, Dr. Meader has been engineering methods of coding and listing medical information. He has compiled lists of clinical material and relationships daily for over 35 years. With other colleagues, he marketed LABSEARCH (1983), LABSEARCH286 (1989), and then the REMIND4 diagnostic software (1993) with Dr. Pribor. REMIND4 has been expanded, improved and is constantly updated. This software is now called DiagnosisPro.
In the beginning, Dr. Meader designed index cards of diseases and attributes to sort; he overlayed photography methods or an x-ray summation of dots (indicating the position and intensity) on the cards. Next, with computers and data file management, he named and categorized almost 9,000 diseases/drugs and 13,000 attributes (each one stripped of its synonymic noise) and coded each with a unique randomly assigned six-digit token or symbol. With the difficulty of semantics and confusion of terms removed, the use of symbol strings instead of "language" strings resulted in speedy sort-and-retrieval times.
In 1981 and 1982, Dr. Meader published and sold these codes, categories and methods in a seven volume set of Indexes. These Microcomputer Diagnostic Indexing (MDI) volumes were sold by the MDI project in Hingham, MA. This effort was recognized by the editors and principals at Springer Verlag who placed his photo on the cover of their premier issue of "MD and Computers Journal" (Medcomp) in 1983 and it featured his story and personal efforts.
APPC Data Processing, Inc. in Nashville and Dr. Hugo Pribor, MD., Ph.D. took the strong points of LABSEARCH286 and greatly improved on its drawbacks to develop the REMIND4 software. The streamlined and updated program - now named DiagnosisPro -- currently contains 11,000 diseases/drugs, 30,000 findings, and 300,000 relationships. DiagnosisPro is developed exclusively by MedTech USA, Inc. in Los Angeles, California and distributed by many outlets worldwide. Dr. Simon Kerendian, co-founder of MedTech USA and Vice President of Technology designed the new interface of DiagnosisPro for the desktop, hand-held, and on-line versions. He is also the coordinator between the editors of DiagnosisPro and the programmers. Because of its development history, DiagnosisPro is ordered, transparent, intuitive, speedy, and extremely useful for medical practitioners.