Decision Support

Decision support systems--still in their infancy-- have found wider development in the intensive care unit than in the operating room. Their birthing has been in areas of internal-medicine type thought: enormous amounts of data reduced to a single diagnosis. An example is the fantastic success of automated EKG analysis systems. However, the HELP system at LDS Hospital has had a significant impact on much more common and mundane aspects of patient management. The progress of such systems will now be considerably enhanced by the advent of standardized communications protocols (such as the IEEE P1073 Medical Information Bus) that will allow bedside computers to much more easily receive information from all monitoring equipment, with easy connect and disconnect.

Developers of such systems speak of

DATA which comes from measurements 	
becoming    INFORMATION   by transformation 	
becoming       INTEGRATION   by combining 	
and finally	 DECISION SUPPORT by adding inference.

Systems developed at the HELP system so far include:

* automated clinical ALERTS to abnormal laboratory values
* automated pharmacy evaluations for drug-drug, drug-lab and drug-allergy interactions
* automated protocol instructions for ventilator management of ARDS patients (with a claimed significant reduction in mortality)

As decision-support systems allow physicians to follow more well-organized large scale protocols, the developers of such systems argue that better analysis of the performance of therapeutic regimes will become possible.

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