Professor Patrik Eklund, Datavetenskap: A Generic System for Developing Medical Decision Support

The overall objective of information handling, within the medical domain, is to use interconnected information systems to support patient care management, in order to enable communication and information flow between home care units, primary care units and hospitals.

In a workflow scenario describing patient care management, patient information is always instantly available for the general practitioner as well as the specialist. Information systems within patient care management should promote large-scale access to information sources, both related to patient specific information as well as supporting information required during the health care situation. Patient specific information resides mainly in patient record systems and in image archives, with supporting documentation and decision support being integrated into a wide range of systems.

In general, information retrieval involves a long-term broad co-ordination of different health care registers and databases to support region-wide information exchange and utility, thereby supporting a more flexible database management and providing a platform for developing distributed information systems. Database management systems' (DBMSs) range from patient record systems in primary care units, through hospital information systems, to other public organisation information systems and demographic backbones.

A leading ambition for our development work has been to establish a data analysis and knowledge elicitation workbench, in which medical professionals can create expert systems. Users can utilize the workbench in order to generate rule bases and graphical user interfaces, and integrating them into stand-alone systems. Thus the classical knowledge acquisition technique, heavily depending on close cooperation between domain experts and systems engineers, is replaced by eliciation facilities

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Kenneth Nilsson