An application for mobile devices focused on clinical decision support: Diabetes mellitus case

Abstract

Clinical decision-making is performed by health professionals and it is currently connected to the need for manual query for these professionals for clinical guidelines, which are generally formed by large text files, which makes this process very slow and laborious. The development of mobility-based systems, which has the objective of helping the health-related processes, is becoming increasingly widespread. These solutions provide physicians fast and easy access to information anytime and anywhere, in order to support decision-making processes and the quality of care. This paper presents a decision support system based in the Brazilian primary care notebook: Diabetes Mellitus. The solution allows the physicians to interact with a flow of structured questions to assist in clinical reasoning, and, afterwards, they can obtain diagnosis or suggestions of for diabetes treatment. This flow of questions and their outputs are modeled in an ontology, which is found on the knowledge of basic attention specifications. The prototype was tested and evaluated by medical experts, with promising results.