Embodying medical expertise in decision support systems for health care management: techniques and benefits

Health care providers and payers are faced with ever-increasing pressures to lower costs, improve quality, and maximize profits. As medical information technology evolves, more medically related data are being collected, stored electronically within a data warehouse, and made available for decision support in the pursuit of lower costs and higher quality in health care. The article describes how medical expertise can be captured and integrated into decision support systems to improve awareness and predictability of disease and disease-associated financial risk within a population of patients, ultimately providing patient-centric and provider-centric opportunities to improve health and decrease costs. The concept of medical logic engineering is introduced.