Evaluation of decision support systems in medicine

Evaluation deals with the measurement or judgement of system characteristics and with comparison of these with the frame of reference. Evaluation of medical decision support systems is important because these systems are planned to support human decision making in tasks where information from different sources is combined to support clinicians' decisions concerning diagnosis, therapy planning and monitoring of the disease and treatment processes. As the field of decision support systems is still relatively unexplored, standards or generally accepted methodologies are not yet available for evaluation. Evaluation of medical decision support systems should be approached from the perspectives of knowledge acquisition, system development life-cycle and user-system integrated environment.