Decision Support Systems in Medicine - Anesthesia, Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine

A decision support system (DSS) in medicine is a software designed to assist the medical team in the decision making process; it deals with organizational, diagnostic and therapeu‐ tic problems, using data (e.g. variables of the patient) as inputs to combine with models and algorithms giving advice in form of monitor alerts, color codes, or visual messages; it does not replace the human operator, but can improve the quality of care. Modern society more and more asks the medical community for ‘infallibility’ in clinical practice, but errors is part of human intervention: emotions, behavioral and psychological patterns, or difficult con‐ texts can influence human performances. For humans, it is simply impossible to recall all di‐ agnostic and therapeutic options at any time for any given patient [1]. The use of DSSs in the clinical management could solve this problem helping specialists with diagnostic or thera‐ peutic suggestions, making it easier to follow validated guidelines, reducing the incidence of faulty diagnoses and therapies [2], and changing incorrect behaviors.