Summary
Objectives: To reflect on the history, status, and future trends of decision support in health
and biomedical informatics. To highlight the new challenges posed by the complexity
and diversity of genomic and clinical domains. To examine the emerging paradigms for
supporting cost-effective, personalized decision making.
Methods: A group of international experts in health and biomedical informatics presented their
views and discussed the challenges and issues on decision support at the Methods of Information in Medicine 50th anniversary symposium. The experts were invited to write short articles summarizing
their thoughts and positions after the symposium.
Results and Conclusions: The challenges posed by the complexity and diversity of the domain knowledge, system
infrastructure, and usage pattern are highlighted. New requirements and computational
paradigms for representing, using, and acquiring biomedical knowledge and healthcare
protocols are proposed. The underlying common themes identified for developing next-generation
decision support include incorporating lessons from history, uniform vocabularies,
integrative interfaces, contextualized decisions, personalized recommendations, and
adaptive solutions.
Keywords
Decision support - standard vocabularies - information retrieval - genomic and clinical
information - integrative system - knowledge representation - personalized medicine
- education
