Methodological foundation of decision support systems

Colantonio S., Martinelli M.

Decision Support Theory  Knowledge Representation  Clinical Decision Support Systems 

This technical report details the activity carried out within the European Project HEARTFAID, a knowledge based platform of services for supporting medical-clinical management of the heart failure within the elderly population. HEARTFAID aims at defining efficient and effective health care delivery organization and management models for an optimal patients management in the field of cardiovascular diseases. An informative and decision support platform of services will be devised for improving all the processes related to diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and personalization of health care of the Heart Failure (HF) in elderly population. To this end, innovative results on computational modelling, knowledge discovery methodologies, visualization and imaging techniques, and the medical knowledge of the relevant domain will be opportunely integrated to design and develop an effective and reliable Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS): the HEARTFAID CDSS, corresponding to the core of HEARTFAID intelligence. This system will be able to process clinical knowledge and patient-related information, intelligently filtered, processed and presented at appropriate times, to enhance patient care. It will be devised as a service of the HEARTFAID platform for providing an effective support to the daily practice of the clinicians, by implementing adequate data processing algorithms, by providing guidelines to medical protocols as well as access to the knowledge base, by sending alarms in case of critical situations, and by supplying diagnostic suggestions. The main focus of this report is a revision of the State of the Art of decision support systems with emphasis on clinical decision support systems. This work was carried out as a preliminary study toward the actual implementation of the HEARTFAID CDSS.

Source: ISTI Technical reports, 2006