Heuristics in Managing Complex Clinical Decision Tasks in Experts' Decision Making.
BACKGROUND
Clinical decision support is a tool to help experts make optimal and efficient decisions. However, little is known about the high level of abstractions in the thinking process for the experts.


OBJECTIVE
The objective of the study is to understand how clinicians manage complexity while dealing with complex clinical decision tasks.


METHODS
After approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), three clinical experts were interviewed the transcripts from these interviews were analyzed.


RESULTS
We found five broad categories of strategies by experts for managing complex clinical decision tasks: decision conflict, mental projection, decision trade-offs, managing uncertainty and generating rule of thumb.


CONCLUSIONS
Complexity is created by decision conflicts, mental projection, limited options and treatment uncertainty. Experts cope with complexity in a variety of ways, including using efficient and fast decision strategies to simplify complex decision tasks, mentally simulating outcomes and focusing on only the most relevant information.


CONCLUSIONS
Understanding complex decision making processes can help design allocation based on the complexity of task for clinical decision support design.
Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Veteran Affairs Salt Lake City Health System, Salt Lake City, Utah. USA.
Roosan
R
Islam
Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Veteran Affairs Salt Lake City Health System, Salt Lake City, Utah. USA.
Charlene
C
Weir
Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Veteran Affairs Salt Lake City Health System, Salt Lake City, Utah. USA.
Guilherme
G
Del Fiol
Clinical decision support; clinical decision support design; clinical reasoning; cognitive task analysis; complex clinical cases; critical decision method; decision task in medicine; experts’ decision making; heuristics; task complexity