From anecdotes to AI tools, how doctors make medical decisions is evolving with technology
The practice of medicine has undergone an incredible, albeit incomplete, transformation over the past 50 years, moving steadily from a field informed primarily by expert opinion and the anecdotal experience of individual clinicians toward a formal scientific discipline.
The advent of evidence-based medicine meant clinicians identified the most effective treatment options for their patients based on quality evaluations of the latest research. Now, precision medicine is enabling providers to use a patient’s individual genetic, environmental and clinical information to further personalize their care.
The potential benefits of precision medicine also come with new challenges. Importantly, the amount and complexity of data available for each patient is rapidly increasing. How will clinicians figure out which data is useful for a particular patient? What is the most effective way to interpret the data in order to select the best treatment?
These are precisely the challenges that computer scientists like me are working to address. Collaborating with experts in genetics, medicine and environmental science, my colleagues and I develop computer-based systems, often using artificial intelligence, to help clinicians integrate a wide range of complex patient data to make the best care decisions.
As recently as the 1970s, clinical decisions were primarily based on expert opinion, anecdotal experience and theories of disease mechanisms that were frequently unsupported by empirical research. Around that time, a few pioneering researchers argued that clinical decision-making should be grounded in the best available evidence. By the 1990s, the term evidence-based medicine was introduced to describe the discipline of integrating research with clinical expertise when making decisions about patient care.
The bedrock of evidence-based medicine is a hierarchy of evidence quality that determines what kinds of information clinicians should rely on most heavily to make treatment decisions.
Randomized controlled trials randomly place participants in different groups that receive either an experimental treatment or a placebo. These........
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