Case-Based Decision Support for Intelligent Patient Knowledge Management

The majority of healthcare workers in hospitals continue to record, access and update important patient information using paper charts. Disparate patient data (clinical information, laboratory results and medical imagery) is entered by different caregivers and stored at different locations around the hospital. This is a cumbersome, time consuming process that can result in critical medical errors such as documents being mislaid or prescriptions being misinterpreted due to illegible handwriting. Hospitals everywhere are moving to integrate health data sources using electronic health record (EHR) systems as well as taking advantage of the flexibility and speed of wireless computing to improve the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare. We are developing a mobile application that allows doctors to efficiently access accurate real-time patient information at the point-of-care. The system can assist caregivers in automatically searching through very large repositories of previous patient cases as increasingly large hospital databases are making manual searches of such information unfeasible. The system performs computational prognosis by providing decision support for pre-screening of medical diagnosis. A presenting patient's symptoms can be input to a portable device and the application can quickly retrieve the most similar profiles with known diagnoses from large databases which can be used to compare treatments, diagnosis, test results and other information