The socio-organizational age of artificial intelligence in medicine

The increasing pressure on Health Care Organizations (HCOs) to ensure efficiency and cost-effectiveness, balancing quality of care and cost containment, will drive them towards a more effective management of medical knowledge derived from research findings. The relation between science and health services has until recently been too casual. The primary job of medical research has been to understand the mechanisms of disease and produce new treatments, not to worry about the effectiveness of the new treatments or their implementation. As a result many new treatments have taken years to become part of routine practice, ineffective treatments have been widely used, and medicine has been opinion rather than evidence based. This results in suboptimal care for patients. Knowledge management technology may provide effective approaches in speeding up the diffusion of innovative medical procedures whose clinical effectiveness have been proved: the most interesting one is represented by computer-based utilization of evidence-based clinical guidelines. As researchers in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM), we are committed to foster the strategic transition from opinion to evidence-based decision making. Reviews of the effectiveness of various methods of guideline dissemination show that the most predictable impact is achieved when the guideline is made accessible through computer-based and patient specific reminders that are integrated into the clinician's workflow. However, the traditional single doctor-patient relationship is being replaced by one in which the patient is managed by a team of health care professionals, each specializing in one aspect of care. Such shared care depends critically on the ability to share patient-specific information and medical knowledge easily among them. Strategically there is a need to take a more clinical process view of health care delivery and to identify the appropriate organizational and information infrastructures to support this process. Thus, the great challenge for AIM researchers is to exploit the astonishing capabilities of new technologies to disseminate their tools to benefit HCOs by assuring the conditions of knowledge management and organizational learning at the fullest extent possible. To achieve such a strategic goal, a guideline can be viewed as a model of the care process. It must be combined with an organization model of the specific HCO to build patient careflow management systems. Artificial intelligence can be extensively used to design innovative tools to support all the development stages of those systems. However, exploiting the knowledge represented in a guideline to build them requires to extend today's workflow technology by solving some challenging problems. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.