Healthcare providers and hospitals have to handle many other administrative issues besides treating sick patients. It includes –
- Staff management
- Logistics
- Resource allocation
- Maintenance
These issues can be resolved using fault finding flow chart. The flow of information, services, and people get displayed clearly on the flow chart. Flow service can be shown right from the patient’s admission to discharge. If there is an obstacle it can cause a lack of care and dissatisfaction among the patients.
What are flow charts?
Flow charts are diagrams that show the breakdown of a patient’s care process. It helps the medical staff to understand the process clearly and quickly. The flow chart is also a great problem solver. There are various shapes connected with an arrow in every step. The common shapes used for communication are –
- Elongated circle – Start of the process
- Rectangles – Actions or instructions
- Parallelograms – Displays input & output [people, services, or materials]
The other symbols can be used but if only a few people are familiar then getting the message across the medical staff can be a failure, so keep things simple!
Decision tree flowchart software can also be used to evaluate different branches and control execution flow. The charts include a blend of logic, text, algorithms, formulae, explanations, definitions, calculations, graphics, and links.
It helps to capture the best clinical practice from experts and is made available to be shared among wide audiences in a self-explanatory and clear manner. It is applicable for symptom flow charts, medical flow charts, and clinical flow charts.
Medical expert systems
Medical expert systems are programs designed to follow a human expert’s diagnostic decision-making abilities. They generally include two features curated and devised by medical experts –
- A knowledgebase [KB] that summarizes evidence-based medical information. It includes diseases, symptoms, signs, lab results, history, and relationships.
- A rule-based interpretation engine that operates on KB to make a differential diagnosis. The diseases in KB get scored in terms of relationship strength from the input findings.
Unfortunately, using these systems practically is limited because of certain factors –
- Maintenance
- The newly identified disease can take years to get included in the expert system because medical studies are costly.
- A rule-based interpretation engine is intended to be applied in a noise-free setting with all the data made available. For example, a question in the system asks a patient if they have a hematoma. The patient will say ‘No’ because he does not understand the bruise on his leg is medically called a hematoma.
VisiRule is a software tool that helps doctors, nurses, and researchers to define and deliver tailored medical diagnosis, advice, and guidance online. It even offers intelligent and smart clinical decision support.
For example, a nurse can develop a wound care expert system to help her manage the Clinical Practice Guidelines for pressure ulcers. If the nurse is unsure about which dressing to use, she uses the system and finds the answer. The recommendation gets printed after the wound is dressed. The recommendation of care continuity gets stored inside the patient’s folder.
Artificial Intelligence has a lot to offer to the healthcare sector!
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