Decision Support is Good for Your Health
Question 1:
The system discussed in this case was a decision support
system. However, other types of computer-aided support are utilized in
medicine. Can you think of ways that the medical profession could use AI
system? For example, how about pattern recognition? Could that help in
diagnosing illness?
By utilizing Multiple-agent systems, it can be used to
predict the possible treatment available for the patients, estimate the effect
of different medicine (such as chemotherapy) that may effective for certain type
of diseases (such as cancer), anticipate the possible diagnosis, etc.
Pattern recognition is definitely a useful tool for medical
industry. This is because nowadays one patient has many health problems. And it
is impossible for human to collect all these data from each patient, to recognize
the health complications patterns with naked eyes. Only by utilizing AI system
such as data mining agents, it can utilize classification to finds patterns in
information and categorizes them into those classes. Using the system, we can
enter an abundant amount of patients’ medical history, thus making the
statistical analysis more reliable and accurate. And base on the highest occurrence of
symptoms, doctor can know which disease is that.
Question 2:
A big worry in the collating and aggregation of medical
information across department and even medical institution is that the more
access there is to a person’s medication information, the more exposed that
personal information becomes. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act), signed into law in 1996, addresses the security and
privacy of your health data. The law was enacted to try to ensure that medical
records, electronically stored and transferred, would be protected. Do you
think that making your medical records available to the various branches of the
medical industry (doctors, therapists, insurance companies, hospital biling,
etc) is, on the whole, good or bad? Why? Can you think of any instances where
disclosure of medical information could cause problems for a patient?
We think that it is necessary to make our medical records
available to doctors, pharmacist, radiotherapist, etc because by understanding
the full history of the patient, then only can the doctor or therapist make the
most accurate diagnosis. There are many situations whereby the doctors haven’t
thorough check the patient’s medical history, and give the wrong diagnosis to
the patient. A typical example happen in cancer patient, whereby the doctor instruct
chemotherapy without truly finding out the origin of the cancer, thus inducing
wrong type of chemotherapy that cause permanent damage to the patient without
curing the cancer disease. Therefore, making the medical records available to
various relevant parties has its benefits.
Of course, it comes with the security issue for patients’
medical history. Therefore, it is important to take precaution steps, before
the implementation of it. As long as you have a reliable system to safeguard
the patients’ medical information, there should have no problem to implement
this.
Possible problems for patient is that they can never cheat
the insurance company about their medical condition, because everything will be
transparently disclose to insurance agent.
Question 3:
Could predictive analytic be a part of the HHC decision
support system? If so, what sort of data would it analyse? What might it tell
medical staff? Would it be useful only to those who are already ill or could it
help healthy people? How?
Yes of course predictive analytic can be part of the HHC
decision support system. It collects all historical information to predict
future events and outcomes. For example, the system will analyse what age group
of people prone to what kind of chronic diseases, obese people prone to what
kind of diseases, what type of disease prone to recurrence, what combination of
medication are the best and most effective to cure certain disease, what are
the possible causes for certain disease, etc.
It will definitely help not only the ill people, but also
those health people. For example, healthy people also go through medical check-up.
Sometimes when they have certain minor symptoms (example, having trace amount
of blood in the urine which cannot be seen by naked eyes), doctors may not be
able to identify the health problem immediately. By looking at the system with
historical data, doctors may be able to find out the clues, thus speed up the
treatment process, and helping the patient cured at the earlier stage.
Question 4:
A clinical study has shown that telemonitoring, discussed
briefly in this case, helps in keeping down medical costs. In fact, monitored
patients were hospitalized about half as often as those with the same illnesses
who were not monitored. Emergency room visits were five times more likely among
those who were unmonitored. What types of illnesses could be monitored this way
(think chronic diseases like high blood pressure)? Would it make sense to use
the system as follow-up care? How could the data be utilized to help those who
might become sick in the future?
Telemonitoring involves easy-to-use equipment that helps you
track your vital signs at home. Diabetes mellitus, hypertension and high
cholesterol are vital to use the system as follow-up care. By knowing the signs
and symptoms, the patients can be taught on the precaution steps to prevent
severe condition happen. When patients’ blood glucose, cholesterol and blood
pressure is extraordinary high, doctors can alert them, and teach them to
practice healthy eating and lifestyle, creating the awareness for prevention.
Question 5:
Could an automated medical diagnosis system ever replace
live doctors? Why or why not? Would you trust an experienced doctor over a
database that you could query yourself? Why or Why not?
Automated medical diagnosis system can never replace live
doctors because there could be unpredictable medical condition occurred, based
on how the prior diagnosis is done. Therefore, a machine can never be able to
respond to emergency situation like live doctors.
We cannot totally trust on experienced doctor because they
are human, and human could make mistakes. As compared to database, the
information generated from database is much more accurate than experienced
doctor. However, we can never fully rely on database because it could have
errors as well, as sometimes it may not be able to generate answer when the
information has never exist before. Thus I think both database and experienced
doctor is very important. We cannot lose either one of them. And with database,
it can help to minimize the error that might be made by experienced doctor.
Therefore, having a combination of these two will definitely induce synergistic
benefits to the medical industry.
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