A Case for Supplementing Evidence Base Medicine with Inductive Clinical Knowledge: Towards a Technology-Enriched Integrated Clinical Evidence System

Clinical evidence exist in modalities other than published clinical literature, such as clinical data ranging from patient clinical profiles to clinical trials; clinical experiences of eminent medical practitioners; and medical knowledge bases encapsulating knowledge about patient care, healthcare guidelines and protocols, clinical workflow and so on. We propose a technology-enriched strategy to exploit advance computer technologies—Knowledge Management, Data Mining, Case Based Reasoning Strategies and Internet Technology— within traditional Evidence Based Medicine systems to derive all-encompassing clinical evidence derived from heterogeneous clinical evidence modalities. The paper features a conceptual overview of an Integrated Clinical Evidence System designed to augment the typical literature-based clinical evidence with additional technology-mediated clinical evidence.