title: [Medical informatics as a complementary method in medical education].
abstract: The practice of the decision making at the bed side especially highlights the place to be devoted to medical informatics both at the pre- and post-graduate levels. Still in a relatively recent past, say the 50s-60s, most of the medical educational efforts were delivered when watching and then imitating the medical behaviour of an older physician. The medical educators were aware that besides the formal lessons related to selected chapters of medical textbooks, there were an obvious need for better training in the ability to make sound clinical judgements. If this ability has been considered only as an artful and intuitive process neither subjected to theoretical analysis nor to be captured in a formal quantitative model, now things have changed to such an extent that it becomes broadly shared that a science of medical decision making can be reasonably founded and this threefold: 1) Upon a formulated logic, 2) The probability theory, and 3) A value theory. The first gives the hand to artificial intelligence (AI) technics, the third to medical information data bases dealing either with patients (like in hospital information systems) or with literature like MEDLINE or electronic "cookbooks". Basically the probabilistic theory is based here upon a priori probabilities related to patients informations and data and opens the way to bayesian decision making. After this little summary it is stressed that educational informatics in medicine would appear either very central or very marginal, if not optional.
authors.affiliation: Centre d'informatique hospitalière, Hôpital cantonal universitaire, Genève.
authors.forename: J R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Scherrer
mesh_terms: D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; D004501:Education, Medical; D006801:Humans; D008128:Logic; D008490:Medical Informatics; D011336:Probability
vernacular_title: L'informatique médicale comme moyen complémentaire de la formation médicale.