Addendum Achieving Intelligent Clinical Decision Support through Orderset Management

A clinical information system[1] is one with which medics interact to enter orders of symptoms, tests and treatments. Such a system also contains patient demographic information; updated data regarding the patient’s condition may be entered by the nurses or automatically through monitoring devices. An orderset is a list of physician orders that shares a common clinical indication and, thus reflects his/her decision with respect to a particular condition. Ordersets may be collected from clinical information systems and filtered to obtain the core of an intelligent decision support system, which may be used by physicians to prescribe diagnostic tests and treatment. This paper examines the possibility of applying instance-based learning techniques to orderset management to achieve the level of machine intelligence required for delivering such decision support.