Advice and Warning within HIOS+

Abstract

In this paper, HIOS+ Advice and Warning is described. HIOS+ is a decision support system for medical purposes. Its AW module functions as an inference engine, and as such generates advice and warnings concerning medical diagnoses and treatments. In order to be able to do so, HIOS+ AW makes use of models stored in the model base of HIOS+ MM and actual patient data stored in the data bases of the registration system HIOS. Although the development of AW has been initiated only recently, actual reasoning is already being performed in the filter items part of several protocols. Reasoning situations which can be distinguished concerning filter items (findings) are: a GP or medical specialist (1) adds new data to or changes existing data in the HIOS data bases, (2) requests advice, (3) requests information about findings of which outcomes have not yet become available, (4) requests explanations about the reasoning of AW, and HIOS+ AW automatically (5) presents reminders, advice and/or warnings. The heart of HIOS+ AW is a patient/protocol dependent file called MISHITS which enables the actual reasoning process. In this file ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ are recorded when checking filter items of a protocol against actual data of a patient.