Past Research

Coordination and Cooperation in Interdisciplinary Healthcare Teams

An interdisciplinary healthcare team (IHT) has been advocated as a way to manage chronic conditions and complex diseases like cancer. There is growing evidence that the working of an IHT can be improved with better coordination of team's activities and improved collaboration among team members. We are working on developing MET4 - a multi-agent clinical decision support system to facilitate operations of IHT members. Our focus is on aligning the execution of tasks according to a patient workflow and assigning appropriate team members to these tasks. The computer system will make this assignment by evaluating capabilities of each team member and matching them with the capabilities required for successful completion of the task.

Constructing Decision Models by Data Mining

Chart data, particularly those stored in an electronic patient record contains a wealth of information that can be used to develop decision models for supporting evidence-based patient management (diagnosis and therapy). To this end, we use a number of data mining techniques to develop models supporting emergency department management of abdominal pain, scrotal pain, asthma, and minor head injuries. We are incorporating these models into the family of MET clinical decision support systems that assist physicians in making decisions in the emergency department. Some of these models were deployed and evaluated in a live emergency department environment.