Clinical decision support systems

Imagine a situation: A patient goes to the doctor with symptoms that are causing discomfort. The physician will talk to the patient and perform a physical examination to identify the cause of the symptoms. She also will consult the patient’s history as recorded in an electronic medical record. She thinks that one of several diseases may explain this patient’s history and examination findings, but she is not certain. Moreover, she has never actually treated a case of a few of these possibilities. To improve her knowledge and help identify the disease, the physician uses an electronic consultation system, into which she enters the initial clinical findings and which provides suggestions regarding diagnoses and diagnostic tests to order.