Assessing the behavioral impact of a diagnostic decision support system

This paper describes a prototype for research to evaluate the impact of diagnostic decision support systems on the behavior of physicians. Several indices that can be used to quantify the magnitude of impact are proposed. A large medical diagnostic knowledge base in internal medicine (the Iliad knowledge base) was used in this evaluation. The impact on behavior when different inference models are run against this knowledge base is evaluated for two different case domains and physician's specialties.