Summary
Objective
This paper summarizes there cent trends and highlights the challenges and opportunities
in decision support and knowledge management for patient-centered, personalized, and
personal healthcare.
Methods
The discussions are based on a broad survey of related references, focusing on the
most recent publications. Major advances are examined in the areas of i) shared decision
making paradigms, ii) continuity of care infrastructures and architectures, iii) human
factors and system design approaches, iv) knowledge management innovations, and v)
practical deployment and change considerations.
Results
Many important initiatives, projects, and plans with promising results have been identified.
The common themes focus on supporting the individual patients who are playing an increasing
central role in their own care decision processes. New collaborative decision making
paradigms and information infrastructure sare required to ensure effective continuity
of care. Human factors and usability are crucial for the successful development and
deployment of the relevant systems, tools, and aids. Advances in personalized medicine
can be achieved through integrating genomic, phenotypic and other biological, individual,
and population level information, and gaining useful insights from building and analyzing
biological and other models at multiple levels of abstraction. Therefore, new Information
and Communication Technologies and evaluation approaches are needed to effectively
manage the scale and complexity of biomedical and health information, and adapt to
the changing nature of clinical decision support.
Conclusion
Recent research in decision support andknowledge management combines heterogeneous
information and personal data to provide cost-effective, calibrated, personalized
support in shared decision making at the point of care. Current and emerging efforts
concentrate on developing or extendingconventional paradigms, techniques, systems,and
architectures for the newpredictive, preemptive, and participatory healthcare model
for patient-centered, personalized medicine. There is also an increasing emphasis
on managing complexity with changing care models, processes, and settings.
Keywords
Patient-centered - personalized - personal health systems - decision support - knowledge
representation - knowledge management
