Studies in System Science (SSS) Volume 1 Issue 3, September 2013
www.as-se.org/sss
MedAdvice24 – A Decision Support System for Medical Advice Maria J. Assena, João Peixe, Fernando Almeida Innovation and Development Centre, Higher Institute of Gaya, ISPGaya Av. dos Descobrimentos, 333, 4400-103 V. N. Gaia, Portugal maria.assena@msn.com; ispg3216@ispgaya.pt; falmeida@ispgaya.pt Abstract This article presents a clinical decision support system that intends to help clinics and patients to identify a potential disease based on several symptoms perceived and inserted in an IT application of patients’ details. This knowledge is represented through a Business Intelligence algorithm, which uses data from the patient's history to diagnose possible illness. The application offers a registration/login to allow only its utilization by registered users and turns possible the store and access to previous saved information whenever it is necessary. This information will be also used to check the possibility of potential diseases, as well to provide appropriate treatment, namely, the generation of electronic prescription, knowing the type of allergies that the patient may have to certain medication. It is also intended that the electronic prescription is sent to email address of family doctor. Keywords Health; Decision Support System; Information and Communications Technology; Business Intelligence Algorithm
Introduction This academic project was designed in the framework of the discipline of Decision Support Systems and intended to provide a new guidance for health. The motivation to develop this project is to decrease the waiting time on queues, costs of medicines, displacements of medical vehicles and redundant procedures in the course of the treatment of patients’ ailments, for example, a common flu. Furthermore, mostly in remote areas, people are deprived of the access to experts to diagnose disease (Carvalho, 2012). The main objective of this system is to produce relevant data and information for consultations, and with the results obtained at this stage, produce possible diagnoses and an electronic prescription to treat the symptoms. Therefore, the medical environment will be changed from hospital-based one to citizen-based one and the whole health care processes from diagnosis to the electronic prescription with the properly treatment. Our services will be
available when users require them on the available application online 24 hours per day. According to Know and Kim’s (2008) this is an essential requirement for a clinical decision support system. In health, as in many areas, effective use of information technology has often been seen as necessary to many of the core activities that are undertaken. Separate communities have worked on ehealth, on broader health policy and on improving the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) (Bend, 2004). The application can frequently provide useful advice which is not foolproof. In the past, the history of the use of the blood pressure cuff showed that in the early part of the last century physicians were uneasy about relying on the cuff to determine a patient’s blood pressure, instead of using their palpation skills, which was the practice at that time. Nowadays, patients are even allowed to do it by themselves at home. This example illustrates how new devices or systems that appear to challenge what clinicians perceive as their unique skills are likely to be resisted. However, according to Berner (2009), until the use of this application as routine as the use of the blood pressure cuff, it is important to be sensitive to resistance of using these systems. The structure of the paper is organized as follows: in section 2 the state of art provides a brief description on the architecture of a decision support system (DSS) and analyzes the importance of DSS when applied to the clinical area; in section 3 our approach is presented, which contains the system architecture, requisites, modeling and business intelligence algorithm; in section 4 the implementation is conducted; in section 5 the main results are shown, and finally, section 6 draws the conclusions and provides some suggestion for future work. State of the Art A Decision Support System (DSS) is an interactive computer-based system developed with the intention 39