VisiRule for HealthCare
Medical Expert Systems
VisiRule is an easy-to-use graphical software tool which enables healthcare professionals and medical practitioners to define, validate and deliver personalised medical advice, diagnosis and treatment guidance and wellness plans online. These are often referred to as Medical Expert Systems or Clinical Decision Support Systems.
VisiRule is based on conditional logic which makes it ideal for representing and executing Clinical Practice Guidelines and medical protocols in a logical and well founded way.
WoundCare Medical Expert System Demo
WoundCare is a Medical Expert System demo developed by a medical nurse, with no programming skills, to help manage CPGs for Pressure Ulcer.
The first storyboard illustrates the system being used by a nurse in a hospital accessing the system on a computer on wheels. The nurse is unsure about which dressing to use and is using the system to find an answer. After dressing the wound, the nurse prints the recommendation. The storyboard highlights decision support and the promotion of continuity of care by storing the recommendation within the patient folder.
The second storyboard shows a nurse using WoundCare on their mobile phone while visiting a patient at home. The assessment indicates that this wound has gotten worse. The system recommends a new dressing, however it also highlights the need to involve a TVN. This highlights the use of the system on a mobile phone and demonstrates elements such as images, links to guidelines and recommendations for further input from other specialists.
What is Medical Decision Support?
Medical decision support and Clinical Decision Support (CDS) provides timely information, usually at the point of care, to help inform decisions about a patient's care. CDS tools and systems help clinical teams by taking over some routine tasks, warning of potential problems, and/or providing suggestions for the clinical team and patient to consider.
What are the 5 Rights of Clinical Decision Support?
The five "rights" of Clinical Decision Support are:
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The right information (e.g., evidence-based guidance)
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to the right people (i.e., clinical care team—including the patient)
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via the right channels (e.g., electronic health records, patient portal, other means)
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in the right format (e.g., prompts, order sets, alerts)
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at the right points in the workflow (i.e., for decision-making or action)
Why is Clinical Decision Support Important?
The main purpose of CDS is to provide timely information to clinicians, patients, and others to inform decisions about healthcare. CDS can potentially lower costs, improve efficiency, and reduce patient inconvenience.
Use of Medical Expert Systems in Heathcare
Medical Expert System software can be used to help support medical staff adhere to best practice, share specialist knowledge in an easy-to-use way, provide expert knowledge of uncommon areas, as well as, potentially allow citizens to self-service triage.
Medical Knowledge
In VisiRule, medical knowledge is represented using a simple and intuitive decision tree flowchart with logical expressions to evaluate the various branches and control the execution flow. VisiRule charts contain a mixture of text, logic, formulae, algorithms, calculations, explanations, definitions, links and graphics. They can be used to capture best practice clinical expertise from healthcare professionals and make it available to a much wider audience in a simple and self-explanatory manner. This is ideal for Medical Flowcharts, Symptom Flowcharts, Clinical Flow charts, indeed anywhere where you have a well-defined structured approach to assessing, diagnosing and treating a medical condition.
Personalised Advice Generation
Expert advice can be generated and made available for clinicians, patients and medical staff via a collection of interactive, dynamic questions for people to access, anytime, anywhere and on any device. Once set-up, these automated systems are scalable without requiring any additional staff, delivering consistent and trusted advice and guidance while creating a digital record of each session for future reference. This session data can be used downstream to drive other processes such as Electronic Medical Records, workflow automation and report generation.
Medical Calculators
You can use VisiRule not just to capture and validate medical protocols and diagnostics, but also to implement medical calculators. Medical calculators synthesize measurable evidence and help introduce new medical guidelines and standards. Some medical calculators can fulfill the role of CDS for Meaningful Use purposes. In VisiRule you can ask various questions and then combine the answers to compute values according to established formulae.
Clinical Decision Support Control
CDS systems can differ in how much control the user has over the decision. These decisions involve not only whether the CDS is set up to be displayed on demand, so that users have full control over whether they choose to access it, but also the circumstances under which users can, after viewing the CDS information, choose whether or not to accept it. Thsee two aspects of control are related and connect with how closely the CDS advice matches a clinician’s intention.
Reasons for Clinical Decision Support
CDS may be designed to
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remind clinicians of things they intend to do, so they do not needto remember;
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provide information when clinicians are unsure what to do;
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monitor and look to correct errors clinicians have made; or
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recommend that the clinicians change their plans.
Medical ChatBots
You can also use VisiRule to create intelligent logical chatbots.
Medical Diagnosis Expert Systems
Application areas include the assessment of symptoms and provisions of initial diagnosis, treatment suggestions, clinical advice generation, and patient intake automation.
VisiRule Author guides the author in the creation of the medical diagnostic flowchart and creates the appropriate rules. These can be immediately tested using a dynamic questionnaire which contains all the required questions. When you are happy with the logic, you can upload and publish the chart. The presentation of the questions can be customized using standard web technology. As the user answers the questions, the rules are fired and the logic executed. This directs the user to the relevant diagnostic along with a question/answer trail. A graphic of the chart can be displayed at run-time, like a road map, to help people better understand their journey through the medical process.
This means that non-programmers can rapidly build and deliver intelligent, interactive Clinical Decision Support systems (CDSs) which give medical advice of a consistent and assured quality.
Benefits of Medical Expert Systems in Healthcare
VisiRule enables medical teams to improve their internal processes and productivity, and offer automated innovative medical expert systems to patients and other staff. In this way, they can reduce both their costs and risks, whilst improving the service they provide both internally and externally.
It can also free some of your best medical brains from having to deal with the routine drudgery associated with those common yet important tasks, and let them focus on the truly complex challenges which are not so easy to automate.
LPA, the company behind VisiRule, has been in the business of delivering solid, efficient and reliable rule-based systems since 1981 covering areas such as Expert Systems, Knowledge-Based Systems, NLP, CBR and Diagnostic Systems. You can augment VisiRule's basic decision logic with these other AI techniques.