title: Automated test selection in decision-support systems: a case study in oncology.
abstract: Decision-support systems in medicine should be equipped with a facility that provides patient-tailored information about which test had best be performed in which phase of the patient's management. A decision-support system with a good test-selection facility may result in ordering fewer tests, decreasing financial costs, improving a patient's quality of life, and in an improvement of medical care in general. In close cooperation with two experts in oncology, we designed such a facility for a decision-support system for the staging of cancer of the oesophagus. The facility selects tests based upon a patient's health status and closely matches current routines. We feel that by extending our decision-support system with the facility, it provides further support for a patient's management and will be more interesting for use in daily medical practice. In this paper, we describe the test-selection facility that we designed for our decision-support system in oncology and present some initial results.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands. danielle.sent@utwente.nl
authors.forename: Danielle
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sent
authors.forename: Linda C
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: Van der Gaag
mesh_terms: D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D003955:Diagnostic Tests, Routine; D006801:Humans; D008495:Medical Oncology; D009426:Netherlands; D019982:Organizational Case Studies