Designing Computer-Based Clinical Guidelines Decision Support by a Clinician

Abstract

Computer systems have long been promoted for their potential to improve the quality of health care, including their use in supporting clinical decisions. In this work, the need for developing the computer surveillance system, to support CV risk assessment procedure, according to the last update of the SCORE system of the European Society of Cardiology, is presented and documented. The key step, in transorming guidelines into the computer media, is designing the logical pathway diagram, to take structure and human reasoning into rules and recommendations provided by the guidelines. At this step, the role of the end user (clinician) is essential, to adjust human cognition with the computer-based information processing. The second benefit arises from the demand of the computer media for data standardisation and systematic documentation and screening of the whole population, as well, all together leading to the translation of a problem-solving approach, in a medical care domain, into a programed-practice approach. Beneficial is that programs allow follow-up, comparison, evaluation and quality improvement.