A systemic strategy for context-aware decision-support in the healthcare domain

Abstract

There have been far reaching Societal and Geo-Political developments in healthcare provision and the demands placed on primary healthcare systems are outstripping their ability to provide an effective service for patients and efficient use of scarce resources. We discuss the nature of healthcare provision and consider remote consultations with decision-support systems to address the growing demand. We argue that developing such systems requires multi-disciplinary collaboration between domain experts and computer systems developers. We conclude that remote consultation and diagnosis has its place and with decision-support offers the potential to reduce the loading on primary healthcare services and assist in the aim of improving access to healthcare systems.