title: Clinical quality needs complex adaptive systems and machine learning.
abstract: The vast increase in clinical data has the potential to bring about large improvements in clinical quality and other aspects of healthcare delivery. However, such benefits do not come without cost. The analysis of such large datasets, particularly where the data may have to be merged from several sources and may be noisy and incomplete, is a challenging task. Furthermore, the introduction of clinical changes is a cyclical task, meaning that the processes under examination operate in an environment that is not static. We suggest that traditional methods of analysis are unsuitable for the task, and identify complexity theory and machine learning as areas that have the potential to facilitate the examination of clinical quality. By its nature the field of complex adaptive systems deals with environments that change because of the interactions that have occurred in the past. We draw parallels between health informatics and bioinformatics, which has already started to successfully use machine learning methods.
authors.affiliation: Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering, Stopford Building, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PT, UK. stephen.marsland@man.ac.uk
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Marsland
authors.forename: Iain
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Buchan
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D015510:Clinical Medicine; D019295:Computational Biology; D019992:Databases as Topic; D003695:Delivery of Health Care; D005568:Forms and Records Control; D048088:Informatics; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D013598:Systems Theory