A case for supplementing evidence based medicine with inductive clinical knowledge: towards a technology-enriched integrated clinical evidence system

Clinical evidence exists in modalities other than published clinical literature, such as: clinical data ranging from patient clinical profiles to clinical trials; clinical experiences of eminent medical practitioners; and medical knowledge bases encapsulating knowledge about patient care, healthcare guidelines and protocols, clinical workflow, and so on. We propose a technology-enriched strategy to exploit advanced computer technologies-knowledge management, data mining, case-based reasoning strategies and Internet technology-within traditional evidence-based medicine systems to derive all-encompassing clinical evidence derived from heterogeneous clinical evidence modalities. The paper features a conceptual overview of an integrated clinical evidence system designed to augment the typical literature-based clinical evidence with additional technology-mediated clinical evidence.