Improving Pain & Symptom Management for Advanced Cancer Patients with a Clinical Decision Support System

In palliative medicine, healthcare providers aim to provide end-of-life cancer patients with a plan of care to minimize pain and manage symptoms, while providing psychosocial and educational support to patients and their families. Unfortunately, it has been reported that patients often experience unnecessary suffering due to ineffective symptom management as they near end-of-life. Recent advances in health informatics have motivated healthcare institutions to take advantage of clinical decision support systems that assist healthcare providers with evidence-based decision making for pain and symptom management. In this paper, we present a unique clinical decision support system that incorporates case-based reasoning and evidence-based standards of care. It is anticipated that this user-friendly, web-based CBR system will improve decision making for pain and symptom management for end-of-life cancer patients.