http://www.mcgilldaily.com/articles/20738

Diagnosis gone digital
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, October 5th, 2009

Almost every field has adopted digital technology, and medicine is no exception. However, the transformation of health informatics in the past decade has not simply been a change in tools of the trade, but a change in the very way knowledge is acquired and applied.

13th century Anatomical Illustration | Source

As a discipline that brings together health care and information science, health informatics is involved in setting up resources like search engines that doctors can use to retrieve clinical data. These tools can be grouped into two categories – information retrieval systems (IRS) and clinical decision support systems (CDSS).

Pierre Pluye, a physician and associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University, investigates these electronic resources. He explained how IRS provide a way to filter the staggering amount of available information down to only the most relevant.

“There are 19 million abstracts on Medline [an online biomedical database]. Physicians do not have time [to read every single one]… because basically you would have to read 24 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep updated,” said Pluye.

CDSS differ from IRS in that they provide patient-specific information. Clinicians can use calculator-type programs that look at a patient’s history to determine their likelihood of contracting diseases or experiencing medical complications.
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